Read this:
http://www.voxday.net/mart/SJW_Attack_Survival_Guide.pdf
This is written by a guy who has the #1 best selling book on Amazon about SJWs: SJWs Always Lie.
The biggest and most important advice I can give is: NEVER APOLOGIZE

SJW Rule #1. SJWs always lie,

SJW Rule #2. SJWs always project

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

> Isn't this what Correct the Record actually did? And in a way, still doing?

The three laws apply:

• SJWs Always Lie
  
  
• SJWs Always Project
  
  
• SJWs Always Double-down

The recommended section is just a treasure trove of amazing garbage:

Ben Shapiro

Mike Thernovich

Vox Day

This dumbass

The_Alinsky_fearer has logged on

Trump as a soviet worker

Sharia law is coming to your chipolte

The adventures of Hitler

Scott Adams: Failing is actually success

Of course. This is exactly as described by Vox Day in his book

• Social Justice Warriors always lie
  
• Social Justice Warriors always project
  
• Social Justice Warriors always double down

You, Laura Southern, are a bright northern light casting a warm glow on all our shoulders. Thank you for being you. :) Congratulations on your "Barbarians" book I hope it sells like pancakes with bacon and maple syrup.


Did you idolize anybody in the news business growing up?

Because it's essentially true. Gamers were the first community to push back against the media and the SJWs calling them racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist and so on. They demanded proof of everything, showed that claims of harassment were bogus and embarked on a campaign against advertisers that cost Gawker seven figures. People like Milo got involved early and did solid work showing that the anti-Gamergate crowd were a rats nest of pedos and harassers themselves.

Thus when Trump found himself in the media crosshairs, millions of gamers said to themselves "oh, I know this playbook" and knew how to combat it. Vox's Day's book SJWs Always Lie has a chapter devoted to Gamergate which gives a more detailed summary.

Further Reading

Michael Huermer - 'The Problem of Political Authority':

[Hard Copy]

Henry Hazlitt - 'Economics in One Lesson':

[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

David Friedman - 'The Machinery of Freedom'"

[Illustrated Summary]:[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Ludwig von Mises - 'Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth':

[Audiobook]:[PDF]:[ePub]


MisesWiki - Economic Calculation Problem:

[HTML]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'For a New Liberty':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'The Ethics of Liberty':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Frédéric Bastiat - 'The Law':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF]:[Hard Copy]

Ludwig von Mises - 'Human Action':

[Audiobook]:[HTML]:[PDF:[ePub]:[Hard Copy]

Murray N. Rothbard - 'Man Economy and State, with Power, and Markets':

[Audiobook][HTML]:[PDF]:[ePub]:[Hard Copy]

If you're willing to devote some serious time, Man, Economy and State is the most complete explanation that exists of the economics behind ancap ideas. It's also like 1100 pages or something so it might be more of a commitment than you're willing to make just for opposition research.

If you want to get into the philosophy behind the ideas, The Ethics of Liberty is probably the best thing you'll find. It attempts to give a step-by-step logical "proof" of libertarian philosophy.

The Problem of Political Authority is also an excellent book that takes nearly universally accepted moral premises and uses them to come to ancap conclusions in a thoroughly logical manner. I'd say if you're actually at all open to having your mind changed, it's the one most likely to do it.

If you just want a brief taste, The Law is extremely short (you can read it in an hour or two) and contains many of the important fundamental ideas. It was written like 200 years ago so doesn't really qualify as ancap, but it has the advantage of being easily digestible and also being (and I can't stress this enough) beautifully written. It's an absolute joy to read. You can also easily find it online with a simple Google search.

I know you asked for one book and I gave you four, but the four serve different purposes so pick one according to what it is you're specifically looking for.

Some responses and questions for your thoughts here (thanks for being thorough, by the way):

You say:

> 1) The polarization of society shows that… moral standards are being strengthened rather than lowered.

> a) To say that [moral standards] are lower because they are not Catholic is to [claim that the] Church [is] right because it says it is right, not because it is [demonstrable.]

I say:

First, “polarization of society” does not equal a “strengthening” of Catholic moral standards. Just because two groups hold competing and increasingly hostile views does not mean that either of those groups hold to the fullness of any particular moral standard, let alone Catholic ones.

As an aside, I’d also be interested in what you mean by “polarization of society.” Which society? What kind of moral structure do these two polarities adhere to? Are there really only two dominant competing moral theories that exist?

Second, how would you suggest we demonstrate the superiority of a particular moral position in a way that is intelligible to those who lack the moral language or conceptual framework to grasp it? Alasdair MacIntyre writes about this problem in the important work After Virtue—one cannot simply “demonstrate” the superiority of a moral position because we do not have a common lexicon in which to understand these positions.

I mention this because saying something is “not Catholic, and therefore not right” seems to me a very valid way of expressing one’s moral perspective. It doesn’t “prove” anything, but it encapsulates a moral position succinctly and objectively, something more than most modes of modern moral theory can muster. (I had to keep my m’s going there.)

You say:

> 2) In the 50’s and 60’s Kinsey found that 50% of married men had cheated on their spouses. In 1990 Lauman discovered the number to be 25%, and another report by Treas in 200 showed the number of people who had cheated to be 11%, which shows a decline in infidelity over that period.

I say:

These statistics do not account for the rise of internet pornography, ease of access to said pornography, and certainly doesn’t reflect the actual state of affairs (excuse the pun) between men and women today versus 60 years ago.

As for the first point regarding pornography: “Infidelity” is an amorphous moral term, because it always references how we conceptualize “fidelity”. Does a man remain faithful to his wife if he doesn’t sleep with another woman, but masturbates to pornography in the confines of marriage? As the taboo against porn has waned, so has the increase of its consumption (an easily searchable statistic.) It has become easier and “safer” to satisfy extramarital sexual desire through the use of the internet, so it follows that the more “risky investment” of an affair would fall.

Finally, the statistics you mentioned, especially Kinsey, cannot account for the actual occurrence of infidelity. Most are already aware of Kinsey’s methodological problems, and of course the very nature of infidelity is one that is shrouded in deceit.

Therefore, it isn’t helpful to use statistics surrounding infidelity and illegitimacy when discussing morals unless: 1) there is an agreed upon understanding of what constitutes infidelity and 2) there are a number of more reports regarding infidelity with varying methodologies that might be compared.

You say:

> 3) …even though they are not married, [couples with children are] still performing the same roles as if they were married

I say

This isn’t relevant to the thesis that “love, marriage, sex and procreation are all things that belong together” for the simple reason that, even if marital “roles” are established, the sacrament of marriage, which is an essential component of a “right” moral structure (as it relates to the identity of the human person, which relates to the identity of God, which relates to the ultimate happiness of the human person) is deemed unnecessary. This deeming rejects a sacramental word-view, which in turns rejects the foundation of Catholic moral theory (again, as it pertains to human flourishing in relation to the Sacred/Divine).

You say

> 4) “…with the expansion of women’s rights we are… objectifying women less than when Humanae Vitae was written.”

I say

As you mentioned, this is your opinion, and one I can appreciate—but disagree with. I agree with you that this is a “touchy” subject primarily because we haven’t done a good job defining what it means to “objectify” the human person. I think it’s clear this kind of objectification has always been present in human history, but I also think it’s clear that it has grown worse in the 20th century moving forward. Simply look at the “adult entertainment” industry for proof of this: There is literally a multi-billion dollar industry that revolves around turning the bodies of men and women into consumable objects. Not to mention the sex-trafficking industry is operating at an all-time high and demand is ever-growing. These kinds of industries have always existed, to be sure, but never before on such a massive scale and with so much tacit support from the general population.

You say

> 5) “Government coercion in reproductive matters [seem] hardly tied to expansion [of] birth control…children are expensive and as society becomes more consumeristic… people would rather spend their money on more things rather than more children.”

I say

Two things: First, I agree that people would rather spend their money on things than children. This fact supports the thesis that birth control has a corrupting and constricting effect on the morality of a nation, not a liberating one. Orienting people’s desires towards products rather than people is a commonly mentioned moral transgression, in and outside of a Christian ethical schema.

Second, it’s hard to prove “government coercion” when it comes to the expansion of birth control. In fact, countries like Japan are now having to encourage that their citizens not use birth control because of the devastating effect of population decline on the economy. But when the aforementioned consumeristic ideology has taken root even in the minds of those who control government, it’s clear to see why dispensing contraceptives becomes a priority, even to the point of elevating them to the status of a “woman’s health product.”

Finally:

I think that your conclusion that “the prophecies of Humanae Vitae did not come true” is unsubstantiated and, perhaps more unfortunately, a misunderstanding of a component of the document’s argument. The idea that “increased birth control is an effect and not a cause of the shift in moral standards” glosses over the reality that moral standards are tied to material changes. The advent and widespread dissemination of artificial birth control was a catalyst, not an effect for the growth for the already-present disordered sexual ethos found natively in virtually every culture.

Since this was front-paged I'm gonna hijack the top post and link to the work of Karen Straughan. She posts here occasionally and will hopefully chime in on this thread.

Me a feminist? No way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEeCCuFFO8

Is Feminism hate? [skip to the 20 min. mark]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDYAVROaIcs

How Feminism conned society

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RozEFVPDxeg

Benevolent sexism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VupEC0cAWo

The Tyranny of Female Hypoagency

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBgcjtE0xrE

Feminism and the Disposable Male.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp8tToFv-bA

-----

A few good videos by Lindy Beige on female power in history:

Women power in the past

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrgovSZ32Yg

Sex Power: when women were different and men were disposable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSX7iT0n65Q

---------

Nice summary of Issues here: Why we need a men's rights movement

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2xmm3p/i_cant_believe_people_think_we_dont_need_a_mens/

------

Good reading:

The Myth of Male Power

http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Male-Power-Warren-Farrell-ebook/dp/B00IDHV5EM

The Privileged Sex

http://www.amazon.com/Privileged-Sex-Martin-van-Creveld-ebook/dp/B00EX5PJC2/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1427403378&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=privilged+sex

No More Sex War

http://www.amazon.com/More-Sex-War-Neil-Lyndon/dp/1856191915/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1427403395&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=no+more+sex+war

The Second Sexism

http://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427403501&sr=1-1&keywords=second+sexism

The War Against Boys

http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Boys-Misguided-Policies/dp/1451644183/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427403440&sr=1-1&keywords=war+against+boys

Hopefully this also will include members of Cambridge's Women's Center, users of Cambridge's Women's Health Center, Cambridge's women's only gyms (2) (3), the Association for Women in Science, members of Women Travelling Together, members of the Cambridge Women's Heritage Project, and the many, many other women's only organizations in town.

After all, they wouldn't want to be sexually biased in their enforcement of their Code of Conduct, would they?

A Reference book of men's issues is probably your best bet for finding relevant studies.

[MRRef] (https://www.reddit.com/r/MRRef/) is more extensive but will require more digging.

Videos:

The Red Pill (NYA)

Everything by Karen Straughan

Everything by Janice Fiamengo

Books:

[Is There Anything Good About Men?] (https://gendertruce.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/baumeister-roy-is-there-anything-good-about-men.pdf) (full book online) by Roy Baumeister

The Myth of Male Power: Why Men are the Disposable Sex by Warren Farrell

The Privileged Sex by Martin Van Creveld

The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys by David Benetar

The Fraud of Feminism (full book online) by Earnest Belford Bax

Who Stole Feminism? by Christina Hoff Sommers

The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young

Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young

Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young

Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young

No More Sex War by Neil Lyndon

A few works that I think deserve more attention. Some are directly related to Men's Rights, others tangentially.

Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior by Christopher Boehm

War, Peace, Human Nature: Converging Evolutionary & Cultural Views by Douglas Fry et. al

Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance: A Model of Female/Male Interaction in Peasant Society (paper online) by Susan Carol Rogers

Favoured or oppressed? Married women, property and ‘coverture’ in England, 1660–1800 (paper online) by J. Bailey

The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (full book online) by Robert Briffault

Gynocentrism: From Feudalism to the Modern Disney Princess by Peter Wright

Sex and Culture (full book online) by J.D. Unwin

The Manipulated Man (full book online) by Esther Villar

Unknown Misandry (website)

Real Sexism (website)

Eh, Marx was inevitable. He took the ideas of a genius, Hegel, and the idea of the historical dialectic and inverted it.

Marx made a good observation about a way of interpreting the driving forces behind human history. He was ultimately wrong (historical materialism is too simplistic), but that idea was going to happen one way or the other.

We ought to blame Marx as much as Stalin and Mao as well as everyone else who behaved like a total fuckwad when it wasn’t necessary to behave like a total fuckwad.

I recommend everyone to listen to Peter Singer summarize Hegel

https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X

And Marx

https://www.amazon.com/Marx-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/0192854054

Edit: Lots of overlap between Peterson and Hegel btw. Though Hagel was highly critical of the Classical Liberal notion of freedom.

Edit: Fixed spelling for all anal retentives

Adding to that, if you have utilitarian-leaning tendencies, you may want to consider researching effective altruism. In a nutshell, it suggests that when attempting to do good for the world that you should take an evidence-based approach. So rather than donating to a charity because it sounds nice and tugs at your heartstrings, you should figure which (possibly unsexy) organizations are doing the most good. It's very possible for a charity to have a high Charity Navigator rating because its administrative overhead is very low while the actual charity work it does is ineffective.

Relevant organizations/resources:

• A TED Talk by Peter Singer, philosopher and proponent
  
• The Life You Can Save, a book by Peter Singer that readably and compellingly (in my opinion) articulates this approach
  
• GiveWell, a meta-charity that has a lot of information on their approach to giving and does a lot of research on its favorite charities
  
• Centre for Effective Altruism: an Oxford-based organization that aims to promote this philosophy
  
  Of course, you should always give to charities that you like, rather than blindly following what strangers on the internet tell you. But when I give money, I like the idea of trying to maximize worldwide good per dollar.
  
  And I'd also recommend that you research arguments against the practice:
  
  
• One written by a believer as a test of their understanding of the arguments against it
  
• A column by NYT columnist David Brooks
  
• Art is a selfish waste of time, says effective altrusim
  
• An article from the Stanford Social Innovation Review: note, however, that it's very name-cally and hand-wavey
  
• A compare/contrast with a movement called "philanthrolocalism"

TIL Lauren Southern wrote a book as well. It's listed down below in the "buy together" recommendation.

https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examination-Coerce/dp/1137281650

https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social-ebook/dp/B00XCTPVAU/

https://www.amazon.com/State-Collected-Papers-Anthony-Jasay/dp/0865971714

https://www.amazon.com/Against-Politics-Government-Routledge-Political/dp/0415513650/

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Theory-Essays-Market-Anarchy/dp/1479258377

https://www.amazon.com/Legal-Systems-Very-Different-Ours/dp/1793386722

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies-Policies/dp/0691138737

They have absolutely nothing to do with science so they could not even in principle be refuted by science. They are metaphysical demonstrations underlined by the Act/potency distinction, essentialism, principle of causality, deductive reason, ontology, and teleology.

The simplest way then to refute meaningless refutations is to ask if the person stating as such has taken the time to actually understand the arguments and the metaphysics and epistemology they are built on. If not, which in my experience is almost always the case, then their criticism of the five ways is meaningless. If they have, then you can debate epistemic principles, but that is much harder and you’ll probably need to do some additional reading to help work through that.

> 4.Which is a better outcome

The best outcome is following the truth about homosexuality and abortion, don't you think?

And truth can't be "made more accessible" or changed for utilitarian ends like bringing people back. It just is true.

I would highly recommend some good books, such as What is Marriage: Man and Woman, a Defense and Persuasive Pro-Life by Trent Horn. It may help to understand why pro-lifers and people who believe in natural marriage hold the views they hold, before suggesting they change them.

Furthermore, many liberal denominations are in decline, even though they changed their teachings to be more accommodating to outsiders. The Catholic Church does not need to become more liberal or accommodating to current trends to thrive and be successful: https://onenewsnow.com/church/2016/11/20/study-churches-with-conservative-theology-grow-faster

Huemer actually does an interesting examination of political authority in his latest book. You can watch a talk he does about it here

Essentially there are five principles implicit in political authority (page 17) 1. Generality 2. Particularity 3. Content-Independence 4. Comprehensiveness 5. Supremacy. Throughout the work he challenges the ideas of political legitimacy and political obligations.

He does a good job dissecting the social contract and in particular pointing out the failure of the assumptions present in its implicit variant: passive consent, consent through acceptance of benefits, consent through presence, and consent through participating, by examining similar moral situations that would lead us to reject such statements. He also shows how social contracts tend to violate the principles of a valid contract. There's difficulty in opting out, failure in recognizing explicit dissent, unconditional imposition, and absence of mutual obligation.

As you can see he does much more in the book(challenging hypothetical
social contracts, Rawl's veil of ignorance, consequentialism, etc.). I haven't finished reading it yet but I found the chapter on the psychology of authority to be the most interesting so far. He looks at some case studies(Milgram, Stanford Prison Experiment) and examines our cognitive biases(status quo biases, Stockholm Syndrome), as well as the aesthetics of governmental institutions to understand why so many people believe in political legitimacy and obligation.

If anything, it seems the reason so many people held odd assumptions about absence of political power, is that they worry about threats to their life(security, defense, law, safety, etc.) But given the number of threats present by political authority, as well as the general lack of obligation on the part of authorities to help their citizens(see Warren v. District of Columbia, there have been many other cases like this), and moral illegitimacy present in most laws, the alternative seems to be clearly better than the present. Anarchy seems to be much more favorable and it's not at all clear if states really are protecting us from chaos or some sort of danger, or if they are just increasing it themselves.

Huemer's book on the subject - The Problem of Political Authority - is probably the best book on anarcho-capitalism in the last 15 years. Cannot be recommended enough.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839

Collected data on protests between 1900 -2006. Showed that non-violent protests are about twice as likely to work than violent protests. This is the book that extinction rebellion frequently talk about.

I haven't read it, but I think people have pointed to David Benatar's The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys as an example of something you're looking for.

Think by Simon Blackburn.

and

Five Dialogues of Plato.

>you could try treating them like human beings

That noble sounding sentiment is revealed for what it is the moment anyone looks at your comment history.

I'm asking for SJW deconversion stories, not looking for advice on how to generally interact with SJWs. There's already Books written about that.

I'm afraid you're seriously mistaken. Two people of the same sex can't be married. It's like how a square can't be a circle. It just goes against the definition of the term.

If you want to understand why I say this, I highly recommend this book. It explains why it is illogical to consider anything other than an exclusive man-woman union as a marriage.

This isn't about "tolerance". This is about the meaning of the term marriage.

> God without rational proof.

Take an intro philosophy class (just to get familiar with the basics), and then read this book:

Scholastic Metaphysics by Edward Feser. A very well-written book, explains how neo-atheists misconstrue Saint Thomas Aquinas' 5 ways, re-justifies them, and Mr. Feser, who is essentially a philosopher, came to being forced through philosophy to believe in God (he was formerly an atheist), expanding on Aquinas' 5 ways.

The Last Superstition is also a great book and very well-grounded through Aristotle's Cosmological Argument (different from Kalam's Cosmological Argument).


Here's a short intro to his book at this blog: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.co.at/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html

It's a really good book -- the first 50 pages are just him explaining metaphysical terms. After that, the actual book begins. As someone studying neuroscience & philosophy, I approve of his book.

>I consider myself a rational person.

Good, then do the above and get back to me. If you don't believe in God by the end of all of that, I expect you to justify your skepticism to me personally.

peace, bro

accuracy has nothing to do with is just one component of effective persuasion. quick rundown:

there are two modes of persuasion, dialectic and rhetoric. dialectic is based on facts, rhetoric on emotions. dialectic is concerned with accuracy, rhetoric with effect.

rhetoric is without any question the more effective mode of persuasion. somebody who disagrees with you on an emotional level isn't going to listen to your well-thought out and proven assertions that a given thing is wrong. they will definitely listen to effective ridicule or humiliation for their wrong beliefs.

the most effective rhetoric, however, is that backed up by facts. the reason why SJWs are reacting the way they are to the crisis actor meme isn't because of their high-handed moral supremacy regarding the victims of a tragedy, but because they CAN, HAVE, and WILL IN THE FUTURE use tragedies like this as planks to push idiotic social policy, and anything that threatens that stranglehold must needs be anathema. thus, the recent flailing.

you have a tactic at your disposal which is proved to be effective and which is in fact backed up by the truth. there is no more useful term than "crisis actor" because it causes such pain and suffering to the bunnies. use it and use it often.

further useful reading. it's on sale, grab it while it's hot.

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
   
2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
   
3. A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present by Howard Zinn
   
4. Dune by Frank Herbert
   
5. The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-deserve

Tämä on mielestäni ihan jees analyysi Petersonista. Käsittääkseni Petersonin ymmärrys postmodernismista ei ole edes hänen omansa, vaan se perustuu tähän kirjaan, joka ei myöskään ole mitenkään uskottava tulkinta. Tälläisen kuvan olen saanut, kun olen selaillut filosofisia keskusteluita aiheesta.

Yes and no. They effectively have "special powers" because most people believe that they have special powers and act accordingly. And that's because most people still believe in the superstition called "authority."

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

The Privileged Sex

Female Forms of Power and the Myth of Male Dominance

Female Power in the Past

The Myth of Male Power

The Second Sexism

Legalizing Misandry

>Princeton University’s Omar Wasow studied protest movements in the 1960s and found that violent upheaval tended to make white voters more conservative, whereas nonviolent protests were associated with increased liberalism among white voters. “These patterns suggest violent protest activity is correlated with a taste for ‘social control’ among the predominantly white mass public,” wrote Wasow in his study.
>
> Stephan and Erica Chenoweth produced a book, Why Civil Resistance Works, which found nonviolent resistance movements were twice as likely as violent movements to achieve their aims in the 20th and early 21stcenturies.

Important message here. It shows that violence is counter-productive.

Hey, great comment. I'm an anarchist, but I think your replies to the OP are legitimate.

If you were to ask me what parallels I see between theists' beliefs and most people's (statists') political views I would point to peoples' belief in political authority--"the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else, and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else" (Section 1.2: The Concept of Authority: A First Pass).

Basically, nearly everyone believes that governments have a special moral status above everyone else. If they gave up this belief, most peoples' political views would immediately change, roughly to minarchist libertarianism. (Going to anarchist libertarianism usually requires changing peoples' economic beliefs as well, since most believe that life without the state would be nasty, brutish, and short.)

I believe that the belief in political authority is analogous to most religious peoples' belief in god or an afterlife.

As atheists it is clear to you and I that there is no rationality behind peoples' belief in god and heaven. You may have tried challenging their beliefs before, to see if they will give them up. If you have, you will know that some people are willing to respond to your arguments. The fallacies in their responses are clear to you, but somehow they remain blind to them, even if they are otherwise-intelligent people. My friend in high school was like this. He was top of our class and adamantly religious. When I asked him whether or not there were dinosaurs on Noah's Ark I could see his mind wriggle, but he never said, "Yeah, you're right; there is something wrong with my beliefs." It's a fascinating phenomenon. How can so many very smart people hold onto these superstitions?

We have answers. For example, in the lecture Why We Believe in Gods atheist Andy Thomson explains peoples' belief in gods by pointing to various psychological factors that affect us. The better one understands these factors, the clearer it becomes that even if there isn't a god it shouldn't be surprising if many people still believe one exists.

Anarchist libertarian philosophy professor Michael Huemer, who authored the definition of "political authority" I gave above, has given a lecture analogous to "Why We Believe in Gods." He called it "The Psychology of Authority," after the sixth chapter of his book on the same topic, but it could also be titled Why We Believe in Political Authority.

When I first watched the lecture I was amazed by the fact that he managed to explain how nearly everyone could believe that it's okay for governments to do a large range of things which no one thinks it's okay for anyone else to do even if (as I believe and as Huemer argues in his book) there aren't actually any good reasons to grant governments this special moral status.

To reiterate, the (alleged-from-your-perspective) fact that peoples' belief in political authority is mistaken seems as clear to me as the fact that peoples' belief in gods and heaven are unfounded seems to you. Many atheists are passionate about their atheism because it is obvious to them that they are correct and they can't get over the fact that so many other people are wrong. It's the same for me in regards to political authority.

One last thing: You may point out that morality is not a science. The existence of god is a factual matter, but morality is just subjective. I'd agree--I'm a moral nihilist technically. But, I also don't like it when people commit mass murder and I wouldn't want people to use nihilism as an excuse for committing it. The same is true for lesser crimes, such as kidnapping, assault, theft, etc. I also think there is a sense in which the shift in values in societies as they gave up slavery can be regarded as "progress" rather than an arbitrary change in opinion. If you agree, then you may agree that your political views may be "wrong" in a sense, and that if your view on political authority changed it would not necessarily be an arbitrary change, but would possibly be "progress". Your new attitudes towards the actions of governments may be "better" rather than merely different.

If you are interested in attempting to see the world from the perspective of a political atheist, I encourage you to watch Professor Michael Huemer's lecture to first open your mind to the possibility that despite your intelligence, your intuition that it okay for the government to engage in all of the activities that you currently support it engaging in (short of protection of property rights--so police, courts and national defense, limited to this function) may be the result of various psychological biases. This wouldn't show that governments lack political authority, but it would make it seem more reasonable to believe that you might be wrong that they possess it, and you may thus be more willing to take the time to read the necessarily-lengthy argument against it found in the first half of Prof. Huemer's book. The first chapter, which is available online, describes political authority more clearly and outlines the form of the argument against it found in the book. I recommend reading it to see if you think the The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey would have a chance of changing your view.

EDIT: Grammar.

I'm unsure if this is necessarily a culture war topic but I'll put it here just to be safe.

So recently I've been reading a lot of anarchist literature, philosophical and regular and the positions invoked therein seem pretty compelling to me. In particular, the idea that there's some kind of ethical obligation to obey laws seems obviously false (this is philosophical anarchism). Whether the law forbids something that may be morally obligatory, requires something morally repugnant, or just forbids things that are morally permissible it seems like morality trumps the law every time. I don't expect this to be a groundbreaking insight to the community here. My impression is most people here are utilitarians and it seems like it'd be pretty easy to construct scenarios where violating the law is the right thing to do. I don't deny that people may have prudential reasons for wanting to obey the law, only that there are no compelling ethical reasons.

This seems like a weird place to be. We have this whole apparatus of the state issuing commands and injunctions to its citizenry, but no compelling reason why we ought obey these commands or injunctions, compared to doing what seems morally acceptable to us. A lot of the time the state's commands and what we think of as morally right coincide (ex, murder, theft, etc.) but the reason it's wrong to kill/steal/etc. is because of the ethical compulsion, not because of the state command.

From here it's a short jump (maybe a longer one for utilitarians) to anarchism more generally. I don't intend to go as far as Robert Paul Wolff does and insist justification of the state is a priori impossible, but rather all current attempts at justification are unconvincing (unless you're a utilitarian). On this topic I have Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority which, to my understanding, is a very comprehensive summary of various theories of government justification and their problems. A less rigorous take, but perhaps a more topical one, is Lysander Spooner's No Treason which is extremely short and can be read for free at that link. No Treason was written in the context of the American Civil War where Spooner argues that, although slavery is awful and Spooner himself was an abolitionist, the Union was unjustified in forcing the south to remain in the Union. Neither of these will probably be convincing to utilitarians, whose justification for the state is more direct, but maybe they'll help people understand how anarchists/non-utilitarians think.

• Why abortion isn't about "life"
  
• Why outlawing abortion is deeply immoral
  
  If you want to be well prepared, get a hold of prominent ethicist Peter Singer's book Practical Ethics!

The "secular" argument against the redefinition of marriage is based on the discussion about what marriage is. The moment you frame the discussion around "equality of marriage" you're already taking a step beyond the basis that form marriage in the first place, so it's question begging.

One must first define what marriage is and then we can begin to discuss whether people have a "right" to it. The secular argument is based on natural law (regardless if people think or don't understand it).

I have yet to have a single pro-gay-marriage person give a definition of marriage that ultimately doesn't make marriage meaningless, which would mean they're advocating something they don't believe exists in the first place, which is absurd.

BTW, this is a secular defense of traditional marriage: http://amzn.com/1594036225

http://www.amazon.ca/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4 <-- Vox' book. Have it myself in print, great read!

You are painting both "feminists" and "MRAs" with a very broad brush. Feminist thinking is not simple, there are classic feminists like Wollstonecraft, Mill & Taylor, moving to Friedan, Gloria Steinam, and more of the third-wave feminists who are (arguably) more essentialist about gender - but even there, there is a range. MRA and feminists on the most attention-getting parts internet are often reactionary and insular, but that does not mean the whole movement is.

I'm less convinced that the MRA has much of an intellectual wing, but here is one example.

Further, here is an explicit feminist writer on how gender equality hasn't gotten there yet in the US

It was you who claimed theft is a necessary evil. It's cute you think it's my responsibility to disprove your unproved positive claim, but I have no interest not playing that game. If you're actually interested in this discussion, I would recommend you read this book. You can find it online if you like.

Good luck

https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Boomers-Immigrants-Screwed-Generation/dp/1541136942

gotta hand it to her, she definitely used all the buzzwords

SJWs always lie.

SJWs Always Lie.

>The eight stages of the SJW attack:
>
>1. Locate or Create a Violation of the Narrative.
>2. Point and Shriek.
>3. Isolate and Swarm.
>4. Reject and Transform.
>5. Press for Surrender.
>6. Appeal to Amenable Authority.
>7. Show Trial.
>8. Victory Parade.
>
>SJWs don't like to be seen as the vicious attack dogs they are because that flies in the face of their determination to present themselves as victims holding the moral high ground.

Vox Day, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Castalia House, Aug 2015, ASIN: B014GMBUR4 - Kindle Loc. 570

If you're new to econ, I would suggest either Basic Economics, as /u/snatchinyosigns suggested, or "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.

http://www.hacer.org/pdf/Hazlitt00.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=economics+in+one+lesson&qid=1555251994&s=gateway&sr=8-1

From there, you might want to get into some of the morality-focused books, if you want a short/easy one, I suggest "Anatomy of the State" by Murray Rothbard

https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

If you want to learn about how an anarcho-capitalist society could work, I'd read Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman

http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=machinery+of+freedom&qid=1555252140&s=gateway&sr=8-1

> So how do we stem the tide of this neo-Maoism now that their champion (who, after taking money from the most misogynist country in the world and inadvertently funding the most homophobic organisation in the world) is defeated, what now?

I'm going to refer you to the book "SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police" by Vox Day. You are obviously aware of one of the "rules" of being an SJW -- in that book, are some strategies for dealing with them.

• SJWs Always Lie
  
• SJWs Always Double Down
  
• SJWs Always Project
  

Excellent post. I see several points from Vox Day's SJWs Always Lie.


I remember back when I first saw the beginnings of the crossover from "political correctness" to real social justice warrior (SJW) behavior and destroying careers.


Radio "shock jocks" as I recall were the first to really make the news and to be the targets of it.


Anyone remember the Greaseman? He was a huge, and very entertaining, radio personality who lost his career after racial-relating comments. Then it was more and more guys on the radio, both big names and small. Opie and Anthony years ago where contantly getting shit from the new SJW climate where there is a butthurt backlash against mild jokes and humor.


And who can forget Donglegate? This was an ordinary guy with a family and kids with an SJW listening in on a private conversation and publicly shaming him and attempting to ruin his life and costing him his job.


What always amazed me, though, was how with more and more celebrities and well-known people on the receiving end of SJW hate, that few if any seemed to learn the points you made: inevitably they would end up apologizing, only to STILL lose their jobs/clients/sponsors, etc., and SJWs were NEVER satisfied.


No matter what media or category, there was ALWAYS someone at home with no life, ready at the phone or keyboard to stir up trouble and drama at the drop of a hat.


Understand your enemy. Do not disregard the points in his post.

SJW's always lie...

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

They're cuckservatives. Read more here. https://www.amazon.com/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

/r/ethical_living does have some interesting posts, but I'd also like more resources!

Free bonus: some other possible compassionate choices

• Don't waste, especially don't waste food (Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart)
  
• Be generous (The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty by Peter Singer)
  
• Practise Ahimsa
  
• Donate blood and register for bone marrow and (post mortem) organ donation
  
• Volunteer
  
• Love your enemies
  
• Celebrate July 29th

If you're curious about a "survey overview" of postmodernism from conception to today, check out Explaining Post-Modernism. It's only $4 + change on kindle.

"Explaining postmodernism: read it, and feel all logic and sense drain away."
~ Prof. Jordan B. Peterson, U of Toronto.

Better men than me have already done that, but certainly no sickle-wielding communists are going to read them, much less assent to their conclusions.

Dr. Stephen Hicks wrote a very good book on the subject of how the failures of Marxism in the 20th Century gave rise to the postmodern philosophical tradition wherein its adherents eschew rationality and logic, aphoristically embodied by quotes such as:

>Postmodernism “seeks not to find the foundation and the conditions of truth but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” —Frank Lentricchia


>“the normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation” —Andrea Dworkin


>“everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political.” —Fredric Jameson


Dr. Hicks posits that only through the postmodernists’ assertion that reason and logic have failed and by appealing to people’s visceral emotions can they hope to usher in a politcoeconomic system that has been thoroughly disproven.

Postmodernity has gradually engendered the subversive notions of identity politics, political correctness, hate speech, radical feminism, transnormativity, and useless pseudoacademic institutions such as “gender studies,” all of which pervade academia.

Here’s an Amazon link to his book, Explaining Postmodernism

And here’s a fun web application called the Postmodernism Generator that uses abstruse terminology to randomly generate papers reflective of the garbage pumped out by postmodernists. The generator creates papers bearing titles such as The Defining characteristic of Sexual identity: Constructivist
libertarianism in the works of Burroughs that are utter hogwash, but humorous nonetheless and ironically calls to mind a Nietzschean quote:

>Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.

Non-mobile link:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

You should check out a book by Peter Singer called The Life You Can Save. He goes into some detail addressing your point that "You can be an ethical person by simply doing things that aren't unethical."

For example, say you were walking in a park next to a lake. You see a young child drowning in the lake and you are the only one who can do anything about it. Do you have a positive obligation to save that child? By your logic, as long as you did not actively push the child into the lake, you are in the clear morally. But I think in a direct example like this, you would agree that you do in fact have a positive obligation to help.

That is the moral obligation to give to charity, but because the starving child is not in front of us we don't feel like we are on the hook.

> I'd rather get moral and spiritual advice from some random rabbi or imam.

"The sheep gives shitty advice - I'll talk to the goose or the dog next time, that'll be so much better."

Why not try to figure shit out on your own. Read a book on ethics or two. Or talk to Humanists. Relying on friends and family for advice is OK too. Actually, doing just about anything will result in better things than following the advice of organized religion.

The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer.

David Friedman's new, 3rd edition of The Machinery of Freedom just came out. That seems like the perfect gift to me. Not only is it the best book on anarcho-capitalism ever written... it's the new updated edition. Perfect timing.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1507785607/

Bishop Barron would push forward Thomas Aquinas for this, but that is far too extensive to type out his natural theology here. This is an argument from pure philosophy to Catholicism. Not starting with a belief in God, and Catholicism in particular, but building to this truth from philosophy to theology to catholicism.

I would suggest starting with this: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm

Then read this: https://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Metaphysics-Contemporary-Introduction-Scholasticae/dp/3868385444

Finally(if you are still with me) there is about 1000 pages of this to go through: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm

This is because you lost yesterday's argument isn't it. It's okay, I already learned here that you people are always projecting.

If you mean the original Hegelian idea, not Marxism, then good luck; it's bizarre and baffling. The clearest book I ever read on it was Peter Singer's Hegel, A Very Short Introduction. Singer does as good a job as anyone could. For Marx's version, Singer's Marx, A Very Short Introduction is the best introduction too.

Before diving in, Scott does a very good job of explaining why its worth paying at least a bit of attention to Hegel even given his horrible reputation among analytic philosophers

I'm amazed at how little philosophy the ""philosophers"" that write for these magazines seem to know. I've read just two books on Hegel and the very first thing that pops out is how utterly divergent he is from the enlightenment ideal of progress through incremental problem-solving. Hegel's version of progress is Mind/Spirit resolving contradictions through a dialectical struggle, then reaching a new understanding of itself, as part of a historical process with the goal of obtaining absolute knowledge. That's not a kind of progress that Kant or Mill or the American founding fathers would recognize.

This is subjective, but in the moral philosophy course I'm taking right now we are currently covering what is called ethical intuitionism, and W.D. Ross and Michael Huemer (perhaps even Huemer more so than Shafer-Landau and Audi) can be considered some of the best here due to their innovative expositions. Ross is usually taught in intro classes, and Huemer even wrote a book called Ethical Intuitionism.

Ignorant? That was the published opinion of Alisdair MacIntyre, the greatest (and most respected) moral philosopher of the last 100 years in what is generally considered the most important book on moral philosophy in that time period, After Virtue.

Ignorance is not even knowing the basics of the conversation, its terms, its players, and what is or is not actually up for debate. Go spend time on /r/badphilosophy and see how often your own view point comes up.

This book, The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, is a very easy read. Others can vouch for its readability (I know /u/TychoCelchuuu has mentioned this book in the past) alongside me, but in regards to me recommending something like this to you: I've been a native speaker for all my life so I may not be the best in determining how well a non-native reader can understand a foreign text. Hope someone can come along to recommend you some reading from a place of similar experience, good luck!

Woah looks like someone's falling victim to the second sexism https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512

From the /r/philosophy sidebar: Think, by Simon Blackburn. I've read it, and it's exactly what you're looking for.

You'd be hard pressed to find an Ethicist who agrees with you. You know - someone who's philosophy major was in ethics?

Here's a good book to read - maybe you should consider taking an ethics course.

Yea what if the pig wants to be eaten???

I'm usually partial to the "explore fields to find out what you enjoy" sort of thing. One of the best books for this is The Pig That Wants to be Eaten. It's excellent because each of the puzzles it discusses contains an explanation of what problem in philosophy it is related to and what books to read if you want to explore that problem. Once you get a sense for the sorts of things you like thinking about, you know what fields (like epistemology, ethics, philosophy of law, etc.) to explore in more depth, at which point I would usually recommend either an introductory textbook in the field or reading the article + bibliography about the field on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

edit: actually I just read a review on the Amazon.com page, maybe that Pig book doesn't have much of a bibliography for each topic. Oh well. You can Google that shit because it at least tells you the key words.

I'd start by questioning the notion of political authority. There is a range of activities which the state does that we'd condemn a private agent or entity if they did those things. So the question is: what accounts of this authority are there, and do they actually justify our holding governments to different ethical standards as non-governmental entities? (These accounts will typically be appeals to things like social contracts and democracy.) The anarcho-capitalist answer is oftentimes: these accounts fail to justify political authority.

This alone doesn't get you to anarcho-capitalism. You'll need a couple more things. Firstly, you'll need some sort of account of how an anarcho-capitalist society will provide the services or features that seem necessary for any acceptably functioning society. These are typically things like settling disputes (courts?), including tricky disputes regarding certain kinds of externalities, rights protection (police? military?), and, if you are so inclined, perhaps some kind of social justice. Secondly, since anarcho-capitalism is capitalistic, then one will probably need some sort of defense of private property rights as well. (If you already accept private property, then this might not be necessary. But those who are suspicious of it will probably want some sort of account of it, probably for similar reasons that we desire an account of political authority from the state.)

If each of these notions hold up (1 - political authority doesn't exist; 2 - private institutions can provide the services and features required for an acceptably decent society; 3 - private property is just), then you have a pretty good general case for anarcho-capitalism.

As for suggested reading regarding each of these points...

• The Problem of Political Authority, by Michael Huemer. This one attempts to debunk political authority and provides a rough account of how an anarcho-capitalist society might provide for things like dispute resolution and the defense of individual rights.
  
• The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman. While this provides an account of private property, I think the real virtue of this book is its ability to showcase capitalistic solutions to what we typically consider the domain of government action. (Again, things like providing law -- resolving disputes --, providing defense, education, etc.)
  
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick. While Nozick is no anarchist, he is a libertarian, and he developed an account of property entitlement that has been fairly influential, called The Entitlement Theory. While I'm not a strict adherent of this theory, it does seem to capture and explain a very wide variety of basic ethical intuitions regarding property rights.
  
  On the other hand, a good argument against anarcho-capitalism will probably hit on the negations of these points. It will attempt to establish political authority, or show anarcho-capitalist solutions to be highly impractical and improbable, or debunk private property, or something of this sort. Hopefully that helps lay out a sort of structure with which to analyze anarcho-capitalism with.

Don't forget the excellent book from Michael Huemer: The Problem of Political Authority.

Ebook download for free here: Download

If I was going to provide someone with a list of books that best expressed my current thinking on the Political Economy these would be my top ones:

1. The Law - While over a century old this books stands as the perfect intro to the ideas of Classical Liberalism. When you understand the core message of this book you understand why people oppose so many aspects of government action.
   
2. Seeing Like A State - The idea that society can be rebuilt from the top down is well demolished in this dense but important read. The concept of Legibility was a game changer for my brain.
   
3. Stubborn Attachments - This books presents a compelling philosophical argument for the importance of economic growth. It's hard to overstate how important getting the balance of economic growth vs other considerations actually is.
   
4. The Breakdown of Nations - A classic text on why the trend toward "bigger" isn't a good thing. While various nits can be picked with this book I think its general thesis is holding up well in our increasingly bifurcated age.
   
5. The Joy of Freedom - Lots of books, many objectively better, could have gone here but this book was my personal pivot point which sent me away from Socialism and towards capitalism. This introduction to "Libertarian Capitalism" is a bit dated now but it was powerful.
   
   There are, of course many more books that could go on this list. But the above list is a good sampling of my personal philosophy of political economy. It is not meant as a list of books to change your mind but simply as a list of books that are descriptive of my current belief that we should be orientated towards high (sustainable) economic growth & more decentralization.
   
   Some honorable mentions:
   
   As a self proclaimed "Libertarian Crunchy Con" I have to add The Quest for Community & Crunchy Cons
   
   The book The Fourth Economy fundamentally changed my professional direction in life.
   
   Anti-Fragile was another book full of mind blowing ideas and shifted my approach to many things.
   
   The End of Jobs is a great combination of The Fourth Economy & Anti-Fragile (among other concepts) into a more real-world useful set of ideas.
   
   Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful reminder that it is not Capitalism per se that is important but the transformational power of markets that need be unleashed.
   
   You will note that I left out pure economic books, this was on purpose. There are tons of good intro to econ type books and any non-trained economist should read a bunch from a bunch of different perspectives. With that said I am currently working my way through the book Choice and if it stays as good as it has started that will probably get added to my core list.
   
   So many more I could I list like The Left, The Right, & The State or The Problem of Political Authority and on it goes...
   I am still looking for a "manifesto" of sorts for the broad movement towards decentralization (I have a few possibilities on my 'to read list') so if you know of any that might fit that description let me know.

I have a fantastic book for you! Unfortunately it only comes through an academic publisher, so the price is high... but it's an amazing read.

You're welcome! I think one of the best resources out there for these distinctions and other important preliminaries to philosophy is The Philosopher's Toolkit. Chapter 4 does a good job on many of the distinctions.

Philosopher's Toolkit

While some of OP's responses make me question that this is being asked in good faith, I will nonetheless try to answer.

First, one needs to consider the fact that there is literally a book on non-religious reasons why Gay marriage is bad policy. This is a pdf of the article that the book was later spun into with more arguments and sources. It is only 43 pages long and easy to understand.

Ultimately, it comes down to a couple of things: if you think there is value in humans procreating, then marriage policy should encourage biological sex (reproduction) in any shape or form to the exclusion of other relationships, otherwise, there is no added incentive to have children.

Similarly, you need to think of people as having natural ends, limited as they may be. Biologically, humans tend towards survival, reproduction, and expansion. If you do not think humans are supposed to, by our nature (because you deny that humans have a particular nature, which many people do and have done) do anything of the aforementioned, then this argument will ring hollow to you. You might say, is a computer natural? I would say yes, any tool is a natural expansion of our desire to survive and expand. Computers included.

Therefore, you might see then that while a liberal approach (classically speaking) might want to leave gay people alone to enjoy their rights to self determine, the same people might not want to extend incentives designed to reward a stable family unit to a relationship that will neither result in children, nor can.

From the article above:

> A thought experiment might crystallize the central argument. Almost every culture in every time and place has had some institution that resembles what we know as marriage. But imagine that human beings reproduced asexually and that human offspring were self‐sufficient. In that case, would any culture have developed an institution anything like what we know as marriage? It seems clear that the answer is no....The essential features of marriage would be missing; there would be no human need that only marriage could fill....Because marriage uniquely meets essential needs in such a structured way, it should be regulated for the common good, which can be understood apart from specifically religious arguments. And the needs of those who cannot prudently or do not marry (even due to naturally occurring factors), and whose relationships are thus justifiably regarded as different in kind, can be met in other ways.

You can take it or leave it, but it is rather meaningless now that gay marriage is the law of the US.

Ed Feser's books are great:

The Last Superstition, or "Why he's wrong."

Aquinas, or "Why we're right."

And Scholastic Metaphysics: An Introduction, or "As close to the truth as we can get without Revelation."

Aristotle was wrong about some of his natural science, but his metaphysics is not necessarily wrong and is defended to the present day (example).

You need the two most definitive books that outline GamerGate, the lead up to today's problems, how to crush the SJW and how to win.

Vox Day, SJWs always lie.

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 1) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014GMBUR4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_vUaQBb1J635SS

Then

SJWs Always Double Down: Anticipating the Thought Police (The Laws of Social Justice Book 2) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075BGGKLG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_WUaQBb5CMGKYP

> As easy as it would be to cover their backsides and do legally, why on earth would they bung this up?

Well, there's a theory around about SJWs being attracted to HR, infesting it, and then hiring other SJWs until the corporation is about 'social justice' rather than whatever the corporation is supposed to do -- the process is called 'convergence' and illustrated in these two books -- given what we're seeing out of the tech industry, it may be that this theory of convergence has some truth to it.

>Show me an example of a system like this working. I dare you.

https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics/dp/1107629705

https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social/dp/0199365164

https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095

https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175

There is also a whole ton of economic literature out there about groups who resolve disputes using game theory, or long term contracts, things like that, instead of relying on a central governing body with a strong threat of violence.

I kinda feel like you lost the plot of this conversation:
You: "We need to pay taxes so the government can protect us from evil corporations."
Me: "But the government sends your taxes straight to the pockets of the evil corporations and directly creates the problems you're complaining about."
You: "Well, that's not the government's fault."

How do you square those two beliefs?

Still, you did ask for sources, so here's a few (plus an upvote):

1. This one is not primarily about the government's role in the food industry, but you can see the problems it creates woven throughout: The Ominivore's Dilemma
   
2. A podcast episode specifically about the Wholesome Meat Act, from the Tom Woods Show: Ep. 656 How the Wholesome Meat Act Gives Us Less Wholesome Meat
   
3. A book I highly recommend that attempts to explain, from a practical/pragmatic standpoint, why nearly everything the government does is either useless or outright counterproductive to its stated goals: The Machinery of Freedom

Can't wait to read this

>You proved my point exactly, that media is biased.. thank you. They intentionally paint her as such, yet you can’t find any work she has done (without it being completely edited) - aka a primary source.. which can reasonably paint her as such.

>Name one thing, together with primare source footage that mandates her being far right or white nationalist.

She backs "Defend Europe" which is a white-identity/white-nationalist group, and has been arrested in work with them.

She wrote and published this book. from it's own back cover: "Southern is a Right-wing activist"

Her Allah is gay leaflet was the spark that got her denied from entering the UK, which was a trip to meet up with the English Defense League, which is very clearly "far right"

Bunch of fun ones in this video

@4:00 "the Alt-right calls me alt-lite, the alt lite call me alt-right"
@7:29 "I'll be going out and doing some postering for the "It's okay to be white movement"

I can't check further on this 18min video right now, but I'm sure there's more. And this is her talking, not being "busted" so it's only her side, talking to someone on her side.

She's staunch anti muslim, anti lgbt and anti feminism. That's pretty damned clear to me. I don't call anyone fascist or neo nazis, and focusing on the few people that do go that far just undermines your own arguments.

She IS racist. She IS bigoted.

A recent work by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God is well worth reading (it is more philosophical than its title lets on).

Ed Feser's The Last Superstition is good and I would also recommend his Scholastic Metaphysics.

It's very dense, and this is him writing to an untrained audience. Try giving his Scholastic Metaphysics a try sometime.

Scholastic Metaphysics maybe?

Have you checked out the reviews for his book? They are amazing and /r/iamverysmart.

I see one of them wrote with Vox Day, whose collected works could feed this sub on their own.

Never be afraid to call a spade a spade. This was one of the points made in Cuckservative how the left controls what the right can say - http://www.amazon.com/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

USAs kutsutakse neid cuckservative'deks. Räägivad küll kõvasti et on konvservatiivsed, aga lagunevad liberaalide ja sotside jõu all nagu selgrootud.

Alain Badiou recently wrote this article on Hegel's master/slave dialectic, but did so asking the question as to it's relation to real slavery. It answers the question quite nicely while also providing an extremely clear reading of Hegel's argument.

Frederick Beiser also wrote a book on Hegel (there are ways to get the PDF version of this if you look in the right places) that is clear and does a good job dispelling the common misreadings of Hegel.

Peter Singer's Very Short Introduction to Hegel (again, available as a PDF in the right places) is also extremely clear and well written.

If you're serious about reading Hegel, pick yourself up a copy of Phenomenology of Spirit and read through it with Gregory Sadler's Lecture series. He goes through paragraph by paragraph explaining the whole text. He's extremely engaging and extremely insightful.

If you can't get enough Hegel and you want to go all in, I'd recommend The Hegel Variations by Fredric Jameson, Hegel: Three Studies by Theodore Adorno, and Less Than Nothing by some Slovenian guy.

Sorry if that's overkill, hope it helps!

Wish I had time to engage properly today but I don't. Here's some well regarded arguments for realism you can look into if you haven't already.

Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously Shafer-Landau's [Moral Realism: a Defense] (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Realism-Defence-Russ-Shafer-Landau/dp/0199280207/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNVDTNHGJW3FHXNR8821), Oddie's Value, Reality and Desire, Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism, Parfit's On What Matters Wedgwood's The Nature of Normativity, Cuneo's The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism.



And here's some free papers you can read (too lazy to name them all, sorry):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Boyd5/publication/240034001_How_to_Be_a_Moral_Realist/links/556f6f4308aec226830aab09/How-to-Be-a-Moral-Realist.pdf


http://www.academia.edu/4116101/Why_Im_an_Objectivist_about_Ethics_And_Why_You_Are_Too_


https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=433000088031098030104101075089022124028072042008084011092124087113084016108098084005098003032035018116033080110110127020085084106080012039033080068103113067015099089032030091083096096084064089109093065079071016028099008078093021125125068072101086002&EXT=pdf


https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=207103102008006126082026003080087077015002001000090086121025066112086090029103080091030096049125038001052020081100031102121000046002046043009065006112075102115099049080048111067091106094117103109111097113120126103124079110093018090122114122112110007&EXT=pdf


http://www-personal.umich.edu/~umer/teaching/intro181/readings/shafer-Landau2005EthicsAsPhilosophyADefenseOfEthicalNonnaturalism.pdf


http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1007/s11245-016-9443-7?author_access_token=R2EN7zieClp6VWWEo8DyZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6_LyD8T3yNLLNQUBcKQRpfV5lbirZE36eSIc6PLipzIUjIvQrTe9aO4meFw0oJ_Dp784B0R9TnA9qTFaNLe9oWPQUaroxf3o-BsITKWjp_6Q%3D%3D


http://www.owl232.net/5.htm

Have you read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue? It is a great book. In the opening chapter he points out that the classic moral/ethical debates (e.g. abortion, homosexuality, pacifism, animal rights, etc.) are all marked by the inability to step out of one pre-determined system of argumentation. People simply argue past one another. Your comment here about 'human goods' vs. 'penis in vagina' is getting at Alasdair's point. When we have these (optimistically named) conversations, we simply entrench ourselves within the system we affectively choose to be in. "If only these would see that (insert assumed premise), then they would understand." This whole thread is a great example of this dilemma. The premises we assume are usually not even assumed consciously and they end up destroying our ability to have a conversation. Natural law or virtue ethics? 'Penis in vagina' or fidelity?

Free:

Stanford's Intro to logic - w/ Free online tools for completing exercises.

Paul Teller's Modern formal logic primer - w/ free tools for completing exercises

Peter Smith’s Teach Yourself Logic and other materials, like his reading guide

Katarzyna Paprzycka Logic Self-Taught - w/ free workbook

J. Ehrlich's "Carnap Book" - w/ free exercises & tools

Open Logic Project - and List of other open/free sources.

Not Free or Kinda Free:

Gensler's Introduction to Logic - Book not free, but Free online tools

Howard Pospesel's Introductions to Formal Logic (prop and pred) - Book includes useful software for additional logic exercises

Practical Ethics by Peter Singer

Although I disagree with many things in this book it made me reconsider every choice in my life, rethink my moral framework, and my goals in life. For me, no other book has been more thought provoking.

https://smile.amazon.com/Life-You-Can-Save-Poverty/dp/0812981561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1473030892&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+you+can+save

This book is about applied ethics rather than normative ethics. But its still tied to one of the most important concepts in ethics. Namely that most people think of ethics as day to day niceness, but in reality certain things they can do simply dwarf others in terms of importance. So those are the better ones to focus on.

This is easily my favourite question from this sub - "surely we are all too lazy?" In fact I don't have any meaningful comeback to you. I think you're largely right at the moment thanks to general inertia of the population. It's harder going against the norm than it is to go with it.

So let's put your question aside and I want to write to you personally. For me, the path to veganism involved being an addict, being 60kgs (120lbs) overweight, being in chronic pain, being chronically depressed and anxious. I didn't become vegan specifically to stop those things (except to help me lose weight), they were just part of my partying lifestyle for 30 years. In fact, the catalyst for me was one day telling my friend that if I had any self control I would be vegan. I was explaining to her about bobby calves after she asked. I was not even a vegetarian. I realised after then that the story of my life was one in which I had no self control. I literally didn't even want to do my basic self-care (washing, eating properly) every day. I realised that my work was based around reducing suffering for poor people, but my personal life was entirely concerned about increasing suffering to myself. That really ate away at me. I realised that knowing about and agreeing with the ethical aspects of veganism but not being a vegan was just another element of not having any self-control. Once I decided to become vegan, it really helped me with the other issues I had because it's something that can keep me steady despite myself. Like an anchor - I can float away to some extent but it will always keep me from harming myself too much. I realised that veganism was actually the easiest thing to manage compared to all the other shit I had created for myself. But luckily the healthy eating aspect that I choose to follow has helped me with most of my problems. I am still working on my addictive personality, but my addictions are far less destructive now.

The other thing I want to tell you is that we all have cognitive dissonance about our lifestyles but that shouldn't stop us from making some good steps towards positive change. I mentioned above that I work to reduce suffering. I have always donated a substantial amount of money to charity and am a researcher working specifically to improve poverty around the world. I'm also a gamer btw. Noone in their right mind would ever call me a monk. As I mentioned I have lived this lifestyle for a lot longer before I became vegan. So you don't have to be an extremist in order to live a decent life.

The way I see it is that I am always going to make some bad choices but the main elements of my life are anchors that mean that when I do have trouble with decisions, I know I'm not far off where I need to be. This has been helpful for me for a long time.

If you want to figure out how to walk a more ethical path when making decisions about charity, I really recommend reading The Life You Can Save. If you want to just shoot the breeze with me about poor life choices, feel free to PM me.

>previously minarchism

Don't leave us!!!!!!!!

Huemer's problem of political authority.

David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom

Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.

I've read Machinery and For a New Liberty. I'm half way through Huemer's book. I finished part I which is seems to be the most important part.

>WTF is Austrian economics

Don't feel the need to relate to Austrian economics. Personally I'm skeptical of Austrian methodology. Being a non Austrian is a minority view here, but I wish more people took it. Bryan Caplan wrote an essay why he isn't an Austrian. http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/whyaust.htm

I want to add to any list:

• Michael Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
  
  The fundamental question of political philosophy is, “How do rulers get the authority to initiate violence against us citizens (via laws and regulations)?”
  
  This has been answered in various ways over the century, usually by philosophers who had very much to fear from their rulers (e.g., loss of prestige, loss of funding, loss of employment, loss of freedom, loss of life) should their rulers be displeased with their answer. Thus their answers usually glorified their bosses and explained why we peons must obey them.
  
  Michael Hummer has far less to lose and thus he much more rigorously examines the justifications that philosophers have given over time as to why we should believe that rulers have different ethics from us, ethics that no other human would be permitted (e.g., the right to kill, the right to steal), and why we have an obligation to obey them, an obligation that can be enforced by severest of penalties.
  
  The results are eye- and mind-opening.
  

You should check out Michael Huemer. He argues against democratic governments having legitimate political authority, and also argues for limiting the scope of democratic decisionmaking.
See e.g. In Praise of Passitivity, The Problem of Political Authority.

@ninja Definitely read Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority. It is one of the best books you will ever read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

> how a free market could actually work, how justice could be dealt in a stateless society etc.

The entire second half of the book describes a stateless society with probably 10x more clarity than you will find anywhere else.

> that address common objections like who will build the roads

I've made my little contribution to this here:

http://chrispacia.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/who-will-build-the-roads-part-1-the-problems-with-government-roads/
http://chrispacia.wordpress.com/2013/10/12/who-will-build-the-roads-part-2-how-private-roads-would-work/

It depends on what you mean. In one sense, you don't really need a book to be able to have discussions about philosophical issues - just someone willing to engage in good faith discussion. But there are some resources that could help you express yourself more effectively.

Philosophers argue using the rules of logic, so one way to learn how to argue effectively is to learn about logic. There are a lot of great internet resources out there that help you learn to discern good reasoning from bad reasoning. But if you do want a book, I like this Critical Thinking textbook. Very readable and very funny.

For something that applies to philosophy more directly, there's the Philosopher's Toolkit. It explains a bunch of concepts and argument forms you're likely to see when doing philosophy.

Beyond that, there are all kinds of primers on the main branches of philosophy and on specific philosophical questions. You can get a feel for the territory by reading introductory texts or Stanford Encyclopedia articles.

Hope this was helpful.

this is exactly what i do. don't know what i believe right now, but i do believe in tithing/some version of the law of consecration. could no longer bring myself to pay tithing to the church, but still wanted to donate to a real charity. GiveDirectly seems like about as good as it gets.

The best part is, I'm on the verge of convincing my amazing TBM spouse to agree with it. She and I read "The Life You Can Save" by Peter Singer, and it really opened her up to the idea. Really a great book, I'd encourage anyone to read it. Singer's Effective Altruism movement is essentially a secular form of the law of consecration.

Just in case anyone is in a remotely-similar situation, here are the points I made in our conversation after we had both read the book:

• The church only donates $40 mil per year in humanitarian work, which is abysmal for a church that brings in at least $5-7 BIL in tithing
  
  
• The Church has no measurement of the impact of their humanitarian work, it's all outputs (i.e you can't tell how much good your donations actually do)
  
  
• They spend much of their money on malls, for profit businesses, and expensive real estate. We are vegetarians (sometimes vegans, but not always), and she was really sad to learn the church owns one of the largest cattle ranches in the US, as well as for-profit hunting preserves. Why spend our money on things we don't support?
  
  
• They are not transparent in their use of tithing funds, which is contrary to the D&C's "common consent" requirement
  
  
• Singer talks about considering "Room for Growth" when choosing where to donate, i.e. is this charity maxed out with donations, or could they still put them to good use? Even though my TBM wife believes that much of what the church does is helpful, i.e. printing and distributing BoMs, I argued that if they can afford to build mega malls with tithing money, they probably don't need our $ to print more BoMs. Therefore, our money would go farther with GiveDirectly than by donating to the church.

Michael Huemer, the philosopher who wrote the fantastic The Problem of Political Authority, is a vegan (or at least ethical vegetarian). He had a back and forth discussion with Bryan Caplan published to Econlib about it. He also wrote an easy-to-read book on the subject. He takes morality very seriously, and is incredibly consistent about it. If veganism and voluntarism were incompatible, I doubt he would subscribe to both.

> I can't even mention Somolia without fervent denials about how it in anyway equates to volunteerism but how is the vacuum in a failed state going to be filled any better by the vacuum left by a dismantled state?

Voluntaryists don't want failed states. They want (in my experience, and reflecting my own preference too) to build the institutions of a stateless society before the state (as an institution generally) fails, allowing the state to safely whither away with a minimum of turmoil rather than catastrophically collapse.

> Could someone explain a working stateless society for me?

Not in a reddit comment. It's a big topic. There are a few good books on the subject. But you can get a decent start by focusing on law and defense. These are (imo) the problems with the least obvious solutions, relative to the status quo.

Illustrated summary of the machinery of freedom:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o

The Problem of Political Authority:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

Well, for starters I think we should discuss what it means to enforce justice. In whose eyes is justice determined? How is it that one comes to be a party to 'justice being served' on either side of the coin?

State justice systems are, as you indicated, built on something like the Rawlsian Leviathan whereby someone believes themselves aggrieved and transfers what would in prior systems have been their right of vengeance to the Leviathan to pursue. This is a method of breaking the cycle of revenge generated by handling this personally. It might also make the outcome more even-handed because the investigating and enforcing parties are presumed to be less personally invested in the outcome. These are good features of the system. They do not require that the Leviathan-entity be a monopoly (and in fact it is not a monopoly now unless you consider the US system to be the monopoly being enforced everywhere else to varying degrees of success).

There are a rather large number of books and articles on this subject, as libertarian dispute resolution is probably the most fleshed out portion of libertarian thinking. I would recommend The problem of Political Authority and For A New Liberty as good starting places which will allow you to self-guide to further sources.

What AnCaps are advocating for is that the services of the Leviathan can be provided by firms interacting through a market. In some ways this is what exists. A primary difference in what we want from what is available is that we think you ought to be free to choose the firm you go to. Now we (many of us) are advocating for a system based on restitution rather than the 'transferred right-of-vengence.'

So, since we are not advocating for any states, we are not advocating for anything like legislative law really but rather contractual terms and agreements negotiated either through something like an insurance company (the DROs mentioned elsewhere) or through communities of legal agreement, or probably any number of other methods we have not even dreamt of yet.

Any other fans of (the best book on libertarian political philosophy, according to Bryan Caplan) Michael Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority?

> Is a starving man not coerced to steal food? Is a homeless man not coerced to take shelter?

It's like you're not even vaguely familiar with the ideas you put forward, and you don't know they've been a subject of ridicule for so long that people wrote [satirical comics about them years ago.] (http://thelibertarianliquidationist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/002_900px.png)

What's next, who will build the roads?

Because you require something for your survival does not mean that somebody else is coercing you, nature is the coercive agent, and the trials of nature are levied upon everyone, giving you no right to coerce others in order to meet your needs as a special snowflake uniquely so coerced by nature.

> Is a poor man not coerced to sell his labor for the profits of a rich man?

No, he is not. He could conduct his own profit yielding enterprise and engage in free trade with his fellow man in order to meet his needs. If another offers him an opportunity which in contrast to the prior is his best option, that is the opposite of a reason to chastise that other, they should be commended for increasing the opportunities available to the man beyond what he would otherwise have had.

If he is useless to nature, and useless to his fellow man, there is only one way to secure his well being; become a thief, either small scale as the traditional bandit, or writ large as the aspirant to political authority and statehood.

The role is the same, the disguise is the only variance. One steals with a gun and risks his own life, the other steals with a pen and a suit and risks the lives of millions of fools he has conned to act as thieves on his behalf.

> Does capitalist law enforcenforcement not coerce, with its constant threat of violence, kidnapping, and caging?

All law enforcement in modern statist societies is backed by political force. Police forces are financed by taxes levied by entities wielding political force. You continue to ascribe the innate sins of political authority to the actor which by nature eschews its use, and beg for the source of those sins to save you from their ravages.

You may as well cry for a tiger to save you from a vicious lamb.

Wake up, you can do better than this. If you have any hope at all of standing a chance in an argument with an anarchocapitalist, you should at least read [The problem of political authority] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650) by Michael Huemer, at the moment you simply come across as severely ill informed and utterly out of touch with the basic terrain of the debate.

Socialism/Communism

A People's History of the World

Main Currents of Marxism

The Socialist System

The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)

Marx for our Times

Essential Works of Socialism

Soviet Century

Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)

The Meaning of Marxism

The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)

Of the People, by the People

Why Not Socialism

Socialism Betrayed

Democracy at Work

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)

The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)

The American Socialist Movement

Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)

It Didn't Happen Here

Eugene V. Debs

The Enigma of Capital

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)

After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action

Capitalism

The Conservative Nanny State

The United States Since 1980

The End of Loser Liberalism

Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)

Economics: A New Introduction (must read)

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)

Kicking Away the Ladder

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Traders, Guns and Money

Corporation Nation

Debunking Economics

How Rich Countries Got Rich

Super Imperialism

The Bubble and Beyond

Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents

Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

America's Protectionist Takeoff

How the Economy was Lost

Labor and Monopoly Capital

We Are Better Than This

Ancap/Libertarian

Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)

Man, State and Economy

The Machinery of Freedom

Currently Reading

This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)

Also, buy her book.

https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Boomers-Immigrants-Screwed-Generation/dp/1541136942/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485887234&sr=8-1&keywords=lauren+southern

Ok, this article has convinced me to read a copy of this book. Is there anyone else here who is familiar with this or any other book by Feser?

Absolutely not. Why would you think that?

I'm pretty sure we passed peak-Marxism recently. The alt-right is going mainstream, or rather the mainstream right is going alt. We are busy building new infrastructure. We are retiring our cucks and noble losers in favor of less-than-noble winners.

We've studied the left and are starting to fight back in big ways.

Thank you for your recommendation. Just to confirm, this is it?

Vox Day wrote an entire book on the subject:

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

The e-book is only a few bucks, and it's not a terribly long read. But it gives some good info insight into the social justice warrior mindset and how to defend yourself and even counter-attack against them.

Vox Day does answer your question, too. If a SJW takes offense at an inoffensive remark you make and starts to name-call and shame you, there's a list of what to do in that situation. But the most important thing is don't capitulate and don't apologize.

Immigration: (the biggest redpill of all of them) https://smile.amazon.com/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

HBD: (A much broader topic, also check out /r/HBD subreddit) http://www.unz.com/jman/hbd-is-life-and-death/

Behavioral genetics: http://www.unz.com/jman/all-human-behavioral-traits-are-heritable/

SJWs: Where they come from? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_fBYROA7Hk

Race: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2RVIi6M7oM

Feminism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mzYKWDx6YI

Diversity: (Diversity actually destroys communities) https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAltRight/comments/5u734a/what_is_most_worrying_aspect_of_an_international/ddrw8n6/

Hey man. I am in the same shoes as you. I am going into junior year, and I just started reading Philosophy this summer. I would recommend Simon Blackburn's Think. I am two thirds into it, and its great. He touches on variety of questions and different answers to those questions and arguments for and against those answers, and what effect they have on the world. Here is the link.

As a follow up, Simon Blackburn's [Think](Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192854259/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_kGZMyb74JTWKH) does a great job at providing a wide landscape of philosophical inquiries and possible solutions.

As well as Bertrand Russell's [Problems Of Philosophy](The Problems of Philosophy https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514341018/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_7GZMyb8QH6M4T) , which does the same.

>Socrates isn’t really that convincing for me. Especially because of outside information. Modern biology, psychology and physics, has just completely dismissed my belief in life after death, at least when referring to the soul (Intelligence, conscience, etc.) Now of course this is a cheap shot, since Plato was writing this 2400 years ago.

More than a cheap shot, really. I'd argue that you're missing a lot of the value of Plato (and will miss out on the value of a lot of philosophy) if you're addressing it like this. I'd highly recommend Pierre Hadot's Philosophy as a Way of Life, which offers a different, and perhaps more productive way of reading Greek writers than what you're doing. If you're looking for his arguments to hold up to neuroscientific accounts of existence, of course Plato isn't going to hold up, but Hadot (and others) would argue that the Plato was more aimed at human flourishing. Alasdair MacIntyre also digs into Aristotle with this in his After Virtue.

Reddit doesn't like Amazon links with a bunch of options because it assumes they are associate links (links where the referrer get a cut of the sale). So when linking Amazon books on Reddit it best to use bare links such as:

• http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/0268035040
  
• http://www.amazon.com/dp/0268035040
  
  Both of which do the same thing because the book title in the url is ignored by Amazon. In fact you can do the following as well and it would still work:
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/digifork-is-da-bomb-diggity/dp/0268035040
  
• http://www.amazon.com/the-sex-toy-bible/dp/0268035040
  
  Which means you can prank people with Amazon links pretty easily.

Introduction to Logic 2nd ed. by Gensler is a good place to start.

Yeah. My ethics doesn't exclude eating meat now, but if lab meat becomes a thing I will absolutely support that to eliminate the ethical grey all together. By chance, have you read The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten?

The Second Sexism.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Philosophy/dp/0470674512

The Decline Of Males

http://www.amazon.com/The-Decline-Males-First-Unexpected/dp/0312263112/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

For those looking for a good introduction on Hegel, I recommend the Very Short Introduction title written by Peter Singer.

I think my favourite introductory book was Blackburn's Think, which was just a good all-round explanation of lots of areas of philosophy. Another excellent book was The Philosophy Book which goes through the history of philosophy and explains the (or one of the) 'big idea' of the major philosophers. One really nice thing they do is for each of these they do a flow chart of the philosopher's argument for their view, which I found a really useful thing for understanding. Other very good introductory books are the philosophy-related books in the Very Short Introductions series by OUP, for example they have ones on lots of the big philosophers, as well as on ethics, free will, philosophy of science, existentialism, metaphysics, logic, the meaning of life etc.

For non-book stuff, I highly recommend the Philosophy bites podcast. Basically these are reasonably short (10-20 min) highly accessible interviews with professional philosophers. There have been so many now that there's one for practically any topic you find interesting and they are all very high quality philosophy.

What might also be useful to you are the resources on the Routledge site for the UK Philosophy A-Level (i.e. in the last two years of our equivalent of high school we do 3-5 A-Level qualifications, and one of the ones you can choose from is Philosophy) which Routledge publishes a textbook for. There are lots of pdf documents on there written to help students understand the various topics which are worth looking at. N.B. AS refers to the 1st year of A-Level and A2 to the second year, so the AS resources will be simpler than the A2 ones.

There have been many threads asking the same question; you should search or you haven't searched well. Anyway, I popular recommendation in another post was Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy by Blackburn. I downloaded it and it's pretty lay (compared to the Kant and Nietzsche I tried to read xD), but still pretty interesting.

This is generally the answer I give to anyone who's unsure about specifically what they're interested in. You probably wanna spend a little while doing "general reading" so that you can find out what subjects interest you the most. Here are a few introductory books which are commonly recommended in no particular order:

• Think by Simon Blackburn
  
• A Little History of Philosophy by Nigel Warburton
  
• An Introduction to Philosophy by Jon Nuttall
  
  These books all cast a very large net. The Warburton book (from what I remember) gives a more chronological account since it's concerned with the history of the ideas as well as the ideas themselves. Though, this was my first introduction to philosophy and worked just as well as any other.
  
  Given the authors you've mentioned, you might be particularly interested in the religious philosophy, ethics and political philosophy sections but you sound open to anything new. A tip: if you get your hands on one or two or these books, as you go through them, make notes on authors or particular ideas that you find interesting so that you can branch your reading out independently based on your preferences. These books will very much be discussing the classics of western philosophy like Hume, Descartes, Aquinas, Kant (maybe) etc at least a bit so I would also recommend searching out contemporary writers or 2nd hand sources if you're interested in the ideas of these historical figures. I say this because diving into their original works early on will be intimidating, exhausting and probably uninteresting. You may well find them difficult to interpret without knowing before hand what they're getting at. Having some idea of their historical context also helps. Contemporary writers are usually more approachable and sometimes more relevant.
  
  ​
  
  If you're also looking for good introductions to other topics like physics, I could help you out. In the spirit of this sub, I'll recommend you a couple writers that are philosophy literate. Philosophy has gotten a bad rap from popular science icons like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, recently. Lawrence Krauss probably dominates in terms of ignorance but hey that's just my opinion. Nye, on the other hand, has recently changed his tune. Don't let this put you off because there are popular science writers like Sean Carroll and Carlo Rovelli who know their philosophy and understand the historical and conceptual importance of philosophy to their science. Here are my recommendations:
  
  
• The Big Picture by Sean Carroll
  
• From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll
  
• Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
  
• Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
  
  The Big Picture is Sean Carroll's "treatise" on his philosophy, essentially. It covers is views about knowledge, values and science all in one. (Scare quotes because the book is intended for a large audience and the word 'treatise' makes it sound a lot more dense than it really is). In it, he introduces Bayesian epistemology which is quite a popular idea in contemporary philosophy of science.
  
  From Eternity to Here essentially aims to answer quite metaphysical questions about our experience of time like where it "comes from" and in some parts he aims to resolve paradoxes relating to time travel all from the point of view of our best theories of physics. He also discusses big bang cosmology and, throughout, pays great respect to other philosophical views on the questions he's discussing.
  
  Seven Brief Lessons is basically what it says on the tin. It's a very short introduction and is probably the best place to start off reading popular physics (at least on this list).
  
  Reality Is Not What It Seems is a discussion of the history of physics essentially from the ancient greeks up until modern speculation on quantum gravity. Rovelli also pays great respects to the 'physicists of antiquity' by discussing ancient greek ideas about physics and metaphysics within the light of modern physics. He gives credit where credit is due and then some.
  
  Hope this was helpful.
  
  Oh, P.S. A few people have recommended the SEP but I'd be careful with it since plenty of the articles on there get pretty damn technical pretty quick and even sometimes they assume knowledge that you may not have. It's usually best used to accompany other reading and when you know what you're looking for (in terms of author, period, topic etc). Going on there and just blindly searching by topic probably isn't a good idea. A similar resource which presents topics in slightly less detail is the IEP.
  
  Here's a good youtube channel to check out too.

>And I don't pretend that I have anything more than a populist's understanding of these topics. I'm surely just scraping the surface of most topics, misunderstanding things, and I would never think I can be part of an academic conversation because I listen to a couple podcasts.

And I respect you understanding your own ignorance in a topic, because that shows intelligence. Philosophy, interestingly, is the subject that most makes me feel more stupid the more I've studied it, so you're definitely not alone! That being said, many people from the new atheist / "skeptic" community act like this gem

>Yeah, I just say "this is interesting, I'd even like to talk about it with strangers", but I acknowledge the second part of your sentence and am OK realizing my understanding is often limited and quite possibly wrong.


And I think you should use that understanding as motivation to maybe go directly to the sources that these podcasts engage with :) Philosophy is a subject with so many fantastic, but extremely accurate introductory books and I go back to them every now and then to refresh myself on the basics. My favorite example is Prof Simon Blackburn's - Think and another really good piece which goes into a lot of informal logic as well as the jargon: The Philosopher's Toolkit

I find both of those to give an excellent simplification of some of the bigger elements of philosophy without overstretching and misrepresenting their subject matter! :)

I've heard this one is good. Haven't read it though.

Currently reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy which I've been told is a good introduction. So far it seems to do a good job of explaining in plain language the more confusing aspects of philosophy, which itself can become confusing. I can only take it in like 10 pages at a time.

Also maybe Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

> In other words, you're contributing to a Christian sub when you are closed-minded to all Christian ideas. Why? To educate all of us dumb Christians?

I don't think you're dumb. I mean some of you definitely are, but that applies equally much to the atheists here as well (although I haven't yet been blitzed with homophobic PMs by one of them).

As to why.

> A great place to start, then, would be to explain why it's objectively wrong to be a "Bigot!" It's something you feel strongly about--and by the way, I happen to agree that real bigotry is wrong--so I'm sure you can explain in a way that won't appeal to the supernatural (since you're an atheist) or the subjective.

If you want me to prove moral realism and an egalitarian ethical theory, you're going to need to give me some time. If you want to skip my sad undergraduate reformularizations of them, see (1) and (2)^(1).

____

^(1. Expecting a single ethical theory to cover all moral situations is to my mind pretty foolish [you need multiple ones for different problems the same way chemistry, physics, and biology all study the natural world but are suited to different environments] but I think this gives the broadest coverage. Which theories are suited to what environments and questions is an important thing to discuss in itself.)

Do you think the netherlands is at risk of falling into tyranny in the near future? Do you think they are a particularly authoritarian culture? This is very internally coherent rhetoric but I wonder how effectively it maps onto our actual world.

So with regard to the notion of the armed citizen struggling to topple the oppressor I'm not convinced that is actually a better alternative to nonviolent actions. This opinion is specifically informed by Erica Chenoweth's highly compelling work, can't recommend the book enough. It's not clear that violent struggle is ever actually more effective even in autocracies, and especially in places with consolidated democratic norms.

Now as for policing, the country that has the best police force near as I can tell is the UK. Part of that is cultural, their institutions were founded with notions of just policing at heart. Further, they're mostly monoethnic communities and those tend to have better policing outcomes as there isn't an ethnic hierarchy to reinforce.

Keeping these in mind, I think it is worth mentioning that the degree to which their citizens are armed does appear to play a role. We ask cops to do tons of stuff that's not just investigate specific crimes, they're also sorta societal magistrates. If your neighbors are having a really ugly public fight that looks like it may turn violent but is now just a screaming match, you call the cops and have them sort it out. These sorts of ambiguous situations have the potential to turn lethal at any time in the US, and this makes being a cop really dangerous. Accordingly, they feel the need to be in dominant control of any ambiguous situation, and a firearm is a really fast way to assert that control. In the narrow scope of our society, it seems that cops would become less resistant to actually rooting out and expelling the aspects of their culture that leads to such crazy rates of violence if our public was less frequently and lethally armed.

That's not to say I don't find any use in the marxist lens, far from it, but I do find sometimes it's a bet existentialist. I find the notion that the only reason I could oppose our civilians owning guns as much as we do is some latent fascism kind of insulting. Guns are not the only mechanism by which society changes, indeed I'd argue they've been much less effective than our institutions at leveling social change in the last century. Part of the benefit of living in a consolidated democracy is that there are avenues for change that are accessible independent of violence

I'm not, though I will have to look at this. The inspiration for this post primarily came from The Invention of Art and After Virtue.

Rawls is obviously important. It's also probably good to read something from the communitarian school of thought. Influential books include After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael Sandel, Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, and Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer.

Well, obviously you should give Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics a thorough read.

A modern philosopher well known for his attempts at reviving virtue ethics is Alasdair MacIntyre - his seminal book on the subject is After Virtue.

Also, another philosopher, with virtue ethics in the baggage, who's more politically oriented would be Martha Nussbaum. She's noted for going on about her 'capabilities approach' for many years, and some people regard this as an equally viable political option to utilitarian/liberal minimal states or Rawlsian social democracies. The literature on the approach is rather massive, so I'd go give the SEF page on the subject a go for starters, as she also makes very compelling arguments strengthened by interdisciplinary research with experts from other fields.

Also, I highly recommend [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414771070&sr=1- 1&keywords=contemporary+political+philosophy), as it has great chapters on communitarianism and citizenship theory, which draws heavily on the Aristotelian legacy - the citizenship theory chapter being especially great, since Kymlicka there points out how difficult it turns out to be trying to cultivate civil virtues in modern societies.

EDIT: grammar.

If ethics is more interesting to you than doctrine, you should read Alasdair MacIntyre's 1983 After Virtue. It's a serious work of moral philosophy, written before MacIntyre converted to Catholicism, arguing that contemporary moral disagreement is unresolvable and therefore useless, and thus we ought to return to an Aristotelian framework. Eventually it requires a deist God at the least to be logical, but he argues for that along the way, and you don't need to begin with such a belief. It is excellent, but you do need a little philosophical background to not feel swamped.

Introduction to Logic is actually highly recommended. Or you can find a free introduction, called ForallX.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher

Thanks for mentioning you're seventeen; it does make a difference (to my mind!). M'colleagues below have recommended some pretty heavy reading, which I don't think is what you're really looking for on the face of it. If I were to recommend a book about philosophy to a seventeen-year-old, I wouldn't recommend a textbook, I'd recommend the following:

Plato and a Platypus walk into a bar. This is a book of jokes about philosophy. They're not very funny, but it's a good way to learn some ideas. Doesn't talk about people (old dead white men, for the most part); focuses on ideas.

The Pig that Wants to be Eaten. This is a little less frivolous; it's 100 little thought experiments. I'd say this is a bite-at-a-time book; read one, put the book down and think about it for a bit, then read another. I really enjoyed this.

Philosophy 101. This little volume is a pretty decent intro to some of the key ideas and thinkers of philosophy. No, it's not a textbook and it's not written by a professional philosopher, which is why I've recommended it. Its mistakes are small enough that if you get interested and start reading some more about the topic you'll pick up where the author went wrong pretty quickly. Again, this is a bite-at-a-time book.

Hope that helps, and of course if you find an idea and you have questions about it: ask away. :)

well. A book that changed my life back when I was 15 was Walden from Thoreau. I threw away everything I owned. yeah I mean everything even my bed. I own nothing that dates from before I was 15. Would this have the same effect today? who knows.

back then, the book Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche had something to to with me ''taking a break'' from school, contributing too did: genealogy of Morals, into the wild, Adorno - dialectic of Enlightenment ( had no idea what that guy was talking about back then but made me real queasy about the world nonetheless.)

books that changed my life recently: Lying from Sam Harris. Steven Pinker - Enlightenment now made me pick a lot of fights with people who like to hate this world.

Insanity of Normality made me forgive some people I had real bad feelings toward, though I'm sceptical now of what is said in the book

unless you understand german you won't be able to read this: Blödmachinen , made me a snob in regards to media. Bernard Stieglers books might have the same effect in english

oh and selfish gene by Dawkins made me less judgmental. Don't know why. I just like people more

EDIT

oh lest I forget: Kandinsky - Concerning The Spiritual in Art made me paint my appartement black blue; Bukowski and the Rubaiyat made me drink more, Born To Run made me run barefoot, Singers Practical Ethics made me donate money and buy far less stuff.

This is a good chance for you to get into ethics/morality. Try 'Practical Ethics' by Peter Singer. It will make you think more deeply and understandingly about morality, including this issue. http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521707684

I think the best readable overview is Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks (also there's an audio version free on his website here). Critical Theory is an outgrowth of Postmodernism (and Marxism more broadly), and Hicks's book is a great and accessible overview of what it means today.

That's not true. He was referring to people like Heidegger and Paul de Man, left wing European intellectuals who were nazis and then became heroes to the new left and post modernists. Insinuating that anybody you disagree with is an anti semite or racist is a stalinist tactic of ziofascist neocons and establishment liberals. Richard Wolin has written about the phenonomena of nihilist, anti enlightenment, anti capitalist, and anti science romanticist European intellectuals who were first nazis and then whose ideas were supported in America by post modernists.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Seduction-Unreason-Intellectual-Postmodernism/dp/0691125996

http://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375668152&sr=1-1&keywords=stephen+hicks

http://www.amazon.com/Deconstruction-Literature-Criticism-after-Auschwitz/dp/0874515661/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375668256&sr=1-6&keywords=david+hirsch

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Enlightenment-Tradition-Zeev-Sternhell/dp/0300135548/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375668499&sr=1-3&keywords=zeev+sternhell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_nationalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-Enlightenment

The two intellectual movements Molyneux was referring to. Supported by European intellectuals like Herder, Heidegger, and Fichte.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer. He's an ancap.

Libertarian:

Murray Rothbard. Samples: Anatomy of the State, The Ethics of Liberty

Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Samples: State or Private Law Society?, Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis

Michael Huemer. Sample: The Problem of Political Authority

http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX_eI-bHNZE

Democracy is tyranny of the majority

The minority can be denied all their rights including the right to life. For example, young men are minority, they are conscripted to military slavery and sent to war.

Quality of decision

A voter understands that the chance his vote will decide the outcome is negligible. He has no incentive to learn much about politics and make a good decision. The voting for him is sort of entertainment. He is more interested in sexual scandals involving politicians.


Ancap critics of democracy is in the book The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer.

>Because society is a social contract.

You really need to read this book.

Michael Huemer pretty thoroughly dismantles the case for Social Contract Theory in his book The Problem with Political Authority

There is a book that I recently bought.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Philosophers-Toolkit-Compendium-Philosophical/dp/1405190183

It is the best resource I could find on philosophical arguments and terms for a beginner.

I started reading philosophy 2 months back and have made some progress thanks to this book. So I wanted to share and hear your views on it if anyone else has given the book a shot.

The Philosopher's Toolkit and The Story of Philosophy both seem like great places to start.

This might help: The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods

If the fruit of your labor belongs to someone else without your consent, you are a slave. Taxation is ethically unjustified, and has only to do with power. As far as states go, well functioning democratic ones are usually less terrible than autocratic ones.

If you want to see how a plausible set of institutions could be made without the use of the tax-slavery system, you could check out this book by David Friedman.

He has a new book coming out soon - http://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Metaphysics-A-Contemporary-Introduction/dp/3868385444 - so it might be a good opportunity to get people exposed to his work and get those book orders rolling in.

One objection that can be raised against full-blown Cartesian dualism, with a material, mechanical body interacting with an immaterial soul, is that it seems to violate the law of conservation of energy, since for the body to act upon the soul or the soul to act upon the body would require a transfer of energy in or out of the material universe.

But I don't know if you can make the hylemorphic conception of the soul understood without first explaining how everything is a union of matter and form. We don't live in a universe made up only of matter with we humans having something extra called a soul, everything has a form and the soul is ours. Edward Feser builds up from this metaphysics to the existence of the soul in The Last Superstition, with competing views attacked in the last two chapters. For arguments at a more academic level, check out the work of David S. Oderberg, particularly "Hylemorphic Dualism". If you're in it to win it, see Oderberg's monograph Real Essentialism, or Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, which has apparently made Stephen Mumford realise he was a Scholastic realist without knowing it.

I know that few will thrill at the prospect of studying metaphysics at that level, but I do think it's important for evangelisation since so much unbelief proceeds from this fiction that what happens at Mass, for example, could in principle be more accurately described in terms of chemical interaction between atoms without reference to abstractions like religion, history, music, or people. So for those of you who are still discerning, please think about a vocation as a philosopher.

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction will certainly cover it, but from a definitely Thomistic point of view. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy, and don't know much about the argument, save I'll probably agree with Aquinas because he's larger and easier to hide behind.

What happened was SJWs Always Lie

Não, é ao contrário. O pessoal atrás do politicamente correcto é que usa esses argumentos/insultos com base na outra pessoa estar a levar as coisas demasiado a sério. A melhor resposta a isso é precisamente responder da mesma moeda.

Basicamente há 3 tipos de argumentos:

O mais raro é o lógico, baseado em estudos reais, e não na maioria dos estudos ficticios e com agendas que circulam pelas redes sociais, nomeadamente o Tumblr. A melhor resposta a este argumento é responder logicamente, com estudos e pesquisa objectiva.

O segundo, mais usado, é o pseudo-lógico, em que a lógica é misturada com a emoção. A melhor resposta a este passa por demonstrar parte da falicidade do argumento, e responder ao restante usando lógica.

O terceiro é retórica. É usar emoção, humilhar, desacreditar. Este é o mais usado, sobretudo por parte dos chamados SJWs. É isto que se faz quando se chama alguém de machista, sexista, quando se diz que a pessoa está zangada, etc. Também é isto que se faz com histórias que trazem emoções negativas, sobretudo o medo. De realçar a onda de histórias, entre as quais uma mulher que foi esfaqueada por um homem no campus, que foi partilhada no Twitter... E que recebeu uma resposta do departamento policial a dizer que nada tinha sido relatado e que a pessoa se deveria dirigir às autoridades (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjmz9K59a7E). A melhor resposta é responder da mesma moeda, procurar desacreditar a pessoa também.

Ou então manda-se a pessoa para o caralho assim que ela começar com insultos baratos, que é o que eu faço.

O que tu estás a dizer faz parte deste terceiro grupo, e a maioria das pessoas que o usa é o pessoal atrás do politicamente correcto. Eu moro com uma "feminista de 3a classe" que me demonstra isto todos os dias.

Se estás interessada nisto, ficam os links:

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought/dp/9527065682/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481137936&sr=8-1&keywords=sjw+always+lie

https://www.youtube.com/user/Shoe0nHead/videos

SJWs are everywhere. Even major corporations are using phrases like 'cis white male' when considering whom to hire. Check out some of the examples in this book:

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police

You might as well be quoting Vox Day. I'm not sure how long I expect this book to stay up on Amazon, given the way the winds are blowing these days.

You might want to familiarize yourself with Vox Day's "SJW Attack Survival Guide" which is from SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Though Police

Have you read SJW's always lie? It's not exactly what you're asking, but when dealing with these people especially if you are a target being attacked. The author is sometimes a douche but it is a decent book.

Think about it. If you hate men where else can you get you're revenge and be practically untouchable.

It's the same with all social justice warriors. Check out Vox Days SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down.

They want you disemployed if not dead. Communists at heart. It always ends this way with them.

SJW Always Lie

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What the hell do you mean we can't win by opposing the liberals on x, then once x passes, accepting x as hallowed tenet of conservatism? What are you saying? That we're cucks? How dare you! When opposing women's suffrage was the right thing to do, we opposed it. But once it was clear that Women's suffrage was in keeping with conservative principles we accepted it. And when we let Reagan ban machine guns and allow no-fault divorce and amnesty for illegals, those were conservative positions, and don't you dare criticize him for it! And we might have been the first ones to propose Obamacare, but when it came time to oppose it, we did! But of course we couldn't repeal it when it came time. It was the status quo once it passed. After all, we're conservatives and we conserve the status quo, whatever the hell it might be.

There's actually a book called Cuckservative that was recently written by two Native Americans as a way to warn the West about white genocide.

Here's the Amazon description of the book:

> Fifty years ago, America was lied to and betrayed by its leaders.

> With virtually no debate, Congress passed the most radical change to immigration law in American history. Since 1965, America has endured the biggest mass migration of people in human history, twice the size of the great wave of immigration into the USA between 1870 and 1930. As a result, Americans are being displaced in their own land by an ongoing invasion that dwarfs Operation Barbarossa, is two orders of magnitude larger than the Mongol hordes, and is one thousand times larger than the First Crusade.

> America's so-called conservative leaders and the conservative media have joined forces with liberal internationalists in openly celebrating this massive invasion, relying on bad theology, outdated economics, and historical myths to falsely claim that immigration is a moral imperative, an economic necessity, and in the national interest. Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America is a powerful defense of America's right to exist as a nation by two Native American authors, as well as a damning indictment of a conservatism that has failed to conserve America's culture and traditions.

> This powerful and remorseless book addresses the myth of the Melting Pot, proves that mass immigration is a net negative for the U.S. economy, and exposes the anti-Christian ideology behind the Christian establishment's support for multiculturalism and open borders. It even shows how 50 years of immigration have lowered America's average IQ. The authors pull no punches in conclusively demonstrating that it is not right, it is not moral, it is not economically beneficial, and it is not Constitutional to betray America's posterity.

> In Cuckservative, John Red Eagle and Vox Day warn Americans that if they do not defend their culture, their posterity, and their nation, they will eventually find themselves on their own Trail of Tears.

https://www.amazon.ca/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

DROs.

David Friedman, the brilliant son of Milton Friedman, head of the Chicago school of economics, can explain it better than I.

https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607

Roger Stone's new book, ‘The Making of the President 2016’: How Donald Trump Rode the Wave of Alternate Media to Become President



Lauren Southern's book




Miscellaneous Pepe fun



KEK (OG Pepe)

> Link to book here, don't be thrown off by the length. Good things come in small packages ;)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1541136942/ref=sr_1_18?ie=UTF8&qid=1482511794&sr=8-18&keywords=Lauren+Southern

IMPRESSIVE LENGTH!

I haven't read this yet, but I'm getting ready to buy Lauren Southern's new book Barbarians - from what I can tell, it looks like it'll be pretty good.

How Baby Boomers, Immagrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation Tho

Lauren Southern's book is super short and easy to read:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1541136942/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485339740&sr=1-1&refinements=p_27%3ALauren+Southern&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&dpPl=1&dpID=51UjKwyaOhL&ref=plSrch

> no purpose other than an emotional one.... led to the widespread image that Republicans are gay hating bigots.

To quote Donald Trump: "Wrong."

The problem with this argument is that it fails to consider the legal arguments against gay marriage. Actually, the only reason why people want gay marriage is because of a misunderstanding of the nature of marriage and their emotional response to what they feel is an inequality(which doesn't exist).

People who give up over the battle of gay marriage due to political correctness are the reason why people see Republicans as gay hating bigots. Basically they are admitting that there is no(and was no) justifiable argument that could be used against Gay Marriage. This patently false, we simply were so involved in Gay Marriage fervor, that no bothered to do a substantial argument against it.

I have said publicly I am not sure who is right, the Libertarians or the Conservatives, but to say there is no good arguments against Gay Marriage is intellectually dishonest.

The best argument in print is here: http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

> The fact is, the only time anyone EVER trots out the "the government should be out of the marriage business entirely" line, is when they are being forced into a corner of admitting they want to limit the rights of gay Americans arbitrarily,.....During the Supreme Court and higher court hearings of the gay marriage cases, I paid close attention and read court transcripts and listened to recordings of the proceedings

Genetic Fallacy, just because you don't like where it is coming from doesn't mean its the wrong position. It seems that you are bias against this argument for no justifiable reason either as many libertarians have been arguing this for years but as I explained above,

I agree they did a bad job on defending in the Supreme Court, still has no bearing on the validity of the issue. People should actively seek out non-religious arguments and taking political arguments from Herman Cain is going to give you a skewed view of the subject.

> Please try to from a non theological perspective defend denying gay marriage?

http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

>Please from a non theological perspective try to tell me why a fetus without a heart beat spawned from a rapist has more rights than the mother whose body contains it?

http://www.cambridge.org/cr/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/defending-life-moral-and-legal-case-against-abortion-choice

You definitely would enjoy some of their works. Particularly:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Marriage-Man-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=X39PYP8GT616NY99W3SC

http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

I had a comment in here giving a reason for he post, though that's not an explanation.

> Note: may not be the best place to post, but I needed to post somewhere in order to link it in Dr. Feser's open thread today, which he only does a couple of times each year. I've been working through his books since early this year, and developing this concept map as I progress.

By way of explanation, this is a work in progress to visualize the relationships between the concepts brought to bear in the philosophical advances of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Beginning for the fundamental argument for the necessary reality of the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the concept map walks through the conceptual divisions of act and potency. Notably, the divisions of act arrive at a core conception of God as Pure Actuality, Being Itself, utterly devoid of any potentiality or passivity. This is not a proof of God, but rather simply serves to define God's role as the First and Unmoved Mover and Sustainer of all things.

The divisions of act and potency expand to the right of the map, where you see how actuality and potentiality come together as Form and Matter to produce concrete, material things.

Branching off of from the soul (here defined as the substantial form of a living substance), there is a section which details the powers or capacities of the different levels of living substances, which are hierarchically related, with respect to the corporeal order.

For now, the section on the Four Causes is placed on its own, as I still haven't decided where best to tie it in, since many topics make use of this principle. Particularly, Final Causation (defined as the end, goal, purpose, directedness or teleology of a thing) is essential to understanding the concept of objective goodness, which carries into the section on ethics (which, in this view, amounts to an understanding of the directedness of the will).

Also included, but not yet connected as well as it could be, is a section on the divine attributes, along with a brief explanation of how we can know them.

There is much more that can be included. As mentioned elsewhere, this was posted here so that I could link to the WIP. I had hoped that I could catch Edward Feser's attention in the comments of his open thread, which he posted on his blog site yesterday, and which he does only a couple times per year. This concept map is the result of my learning from his books:

• Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science
  
  
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions – Editiones Scholasticae)
  
  I am still working my way through this last one, and when done I intend also to read:
  
  
• Five Proofs of the Existence of God

I don't think classical metaphysics is that popular today in philosophy at least in analytic philosophy as far as I can tell. I think for the most part this is true because most people don't know what Aquinas said. However, that really shouldn't by itself that classical metaphysics (at least the one that Aquinas argues for) is false. You basically gotta look at the arguments for classical metaphysics written by defenders in the past and today. One good book is called "Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction" by Feser (http://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Metaphysics-Contemporary-Introduction-Scholasticae/dp/3868385444/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1463600373&sr=8-1&keywords=scholastic+metaphysics). Also the title is a bit misleading and should honestly be renamed Thomistic metaphyics. Not all Scholastics are Thomists and Scholastics in general have a lot of diversity in their views like Scotists, Ockamists, etc.

I finished reading the book, but I plan to go back to it relatively soon and take notes on and really digest it. Honestly I think his arguments are pretty good. He really fleshes out the details and defends many of the background stuff.

A big point about the stuff I read from the book, is that the metaphysics it is arguing for is true primarily because of the existence of change. I'm painting with a very broad brush and ignoring many important details, but basically its 1) Change exists 2) Change can only exist if potentiality and actuality are truly distinct otherwise change would not exist (insert argument by Parmenides for the non-existence of change) 3) the distinction between potentiality and actuality imply much of classical metaphysics like teleology, substance metaphysics, and some other stuff. So basically Feser is saying that classical metaphysics is necessarily true as long as change exists (and I'm not talking about the argument from motion about God).

Edit #1: Also I think most people don't know about Aquinas and other Scholastics, primarily because they just don't read their stuff. Its not that people have rejected classical metaphysics because they investigated. Its like how I have not tasted a meal from certain restaurants. I can't tell the meal is bad because I haven't tasted it. And I in a way "reject" the restaurant because I just ignore or just don't even know it exists.

I should also add that by most people I mean philosophers today.

Luckily Thomism is on the rise.

I would recommend anything by Edward Feser but specifically this

and I would check out Eleonore Stump on this page [here] (https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_2_12?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=eleonore+stump&sprefix=eleonore+stu%2Caps%2C218&crid=1Q51KVUYQ9E1V)

Not exactly an answer to your question, but you may be interested in Prof. Edward Feser's weblog:

• http://edwardfeser.blogspot.ca/search?q=final+cause
  
  He wrote the book/s on A-T for more contemporary audiences:
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Metaphysics-Contemporary-Introduction-Scholasticae/dp/3868385444
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908/
  

From my reading - This is the kind of guy who would have cheerfully thrown another man under the bus if the shoe were on someone else's foot.

That being said, the guy made a huge number of errors in handling this.

There is actually a book out there - on the best ways to handle these situations - a best seller no less :

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought/dp/9527065682/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=sjws+always+lie&qid=1566789213&s=books&sr=1-1


SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day (Ted Beale).

​

There are ways to fight back against the Female Inquisition - and make no mistake, this IS an Inquisition by women against men.

The only good part of all this is that women are red pilling men at a phenomenal rate and guaranteeing that every man on the planet avoid them, most especially avoiding white women.

The social fallout of all this is going to reverb for decades to come.

Excellent list. I'd add:

Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America, where for simplification the author generally used "KGB" for the organization that started out as the Cheka and was the NKVD for a good part of what the book covers. He's an ex-counterintelligence officer, and uses analysis techniques from that field to go from the known operative Willi Münzenberg to known or likely "Willing Accomplices" his effort recruited before he was (inevitably) liquidated by Stalin (the effort was of course restarted later, but the lethal payload had already been delivered, in the US especially after the #1 goal of diplomatic recognition of the USSR was achieved early in FDR's administration).

I'd like to emphasize that anything relevant written or edited by Samuel Francis is going to be great, but you'll likely want to read some of his freely available or cheaper works before buying his $48 magnum opus Leviathan and Its Enemies. He's the guy who came up with the critical concept of anarcho-tyranny, which in classic Wikipedia fashion has been purged from his page, but they forgot to remove the redirect of that to it. (In short, it's a new version of the ancient pattern of top and bottom classes conspiring against the middle, criminals in particular are enabled to prey on us, rules and laws are enforced against us but not them and e.g. immigrants in California, native farmer Victor Davis Hansen has a lot of first hand observations about this.)

For a laser focused analysis of the current SJW phenomena and how to deal with them, you can't beat Vox Day's SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, the genesis of which started with an unremitting out of the blue attack a decade and a half ago by some SF SJWs for really mild and unrelated to their domain badthink. He's a fighter, so it has a lot of good advice as to how to attack and counterattack them. /u/sciencemile recommends Mill's On Liberty, and per Vox Day, Mill would be relevant if for no other reason than his "defining [a] new idea of justice in a form that is still recognizable in the demands of today's SJWs" in his Utilitarianism. (On the other hand, view anything Vox Day writes about economics with extreme skepticism, and I note he's not fundamentally honest, he's quite willing to lie for tactical reasons.)

To get a taste of it, he's written a short SJW_Attack_Survival_Guide PDF that's [currently being discussed on KiA]
(https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/6gx2tl/in_light_of_recent_events_sjw_attack_survival/).

If you want to fight and are not equally adept at rhetoric as well as dialectic and know when to use each, he highly recommend's Aristotle's On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (that seems to be the best English translation, but I've not read it yet, for better or worse my upbringing made me good at both).

Martin van Creveld's recent Equality: The Impossible Quest ought to be very important as well, but I've not read anything by him.

If you're really brave, check out The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, although I only sampled that before starting with the two previous books in his trilogy, in the middle of the third now.

SJWs Always Lie

Highly recommended reading.

Vox Day outlines and explains SJW behaviour and how to defeat them.

These people need to be stopped.

You're exactly right. Not like one can screen for every tumblrina or special snowflake in every instance, every type of employment specialty. But there are ways to cut out the tumor before it becomes malignant, so I've heard.
If you didn't already know, there is an excellent read on the very subject: https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4
It's by Vox Day, everyone's favorite crazy author/publisher.

For more on concern trolling and other SJW behavior, read SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day.

T_D also had an AMA with Day a few months ago, here.

That's why.

Vox Day probably has a lot to say about it - https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

That said, the left won the morality (culture) war back in the 60s and since then has used morality as a club to get what they want. It's only now that they've completely depleted the value of the moral club.

Amazon link

Leaking is not treason. That can only happen when in war time by giving aid to the enemy.

It probably couldn't qualify as sedition either in that while her goals were to undermine a sitting President but given it was meant to show wrongdoing, leaking is an edge case.

Its a separate offense, basically violating a security clearance or maybe espionage.

RW however is going to get a real taste of an unpleasant reality very soon. Orange is her new black

Also Liberals are not Leftists, Liberal can have moral standards, Leftists do not.

Remember Leftists don't have fixed rules either.

Rules for Radicals #4

>The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

They don't have a moral center other than "grab all you can because its free, what the rabbit warren says is OK and avoid actual risk and conflict preferably by pitting decent people against one another."

As such, they are immune to any charges of hypocritical conduct. They simply can't care as they aren't wired for it or any kind of morality other than "obey the warren law"

Once you get past the strangeness and the discomforting ideas (Leftists might as well be aliens) Anonymous Conservative lays it all down.

His book is also often free in PDF , read it or at least the summary and you'll have a goo understanding of who they are

Also read Vox Day's SJW's Always Lie and of course Rules for Radical text

Read up, Pedes its depressing but as Leslie Fish noted "Not all wisdom brings joy" and knowing is half the battle anyway.

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Thought-Justice-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

That’s the standard playbook, I believe.

Thank you. This is actually a very well measured and well formatted post. Let me do my best to respond to each point, if you don't mind.

>labelling critical news of him as "fake news" instead of just biased yet true information, leading to his supporters to completely disregard it

Absolutely. The thing is his opponents handed him the perfect weapon in that a lot of news surrounding Trump, his campaign, and now his presidency is clearly fake. Or at least intentionally misleading, if you prefer. So Trump takes those instances and reminds his supporters of it often so when a piece of news comes out this is bad for him but does in fact have truth to it he can just hand wave it and dismiss it along with the whole media because of their prior transgressions. I'm not saying it's right but his critics in the media have only themselves to blame. They have a credibility problem and Trump did not create that.

>nepotism, allowing Ivanka and Jared to stay so long in the WH despite their complete lack of qualifications, allowing Ivanka to do the duties of Secretary of State and meeting with North Korea

I agree 100%. I don't want Ivanka or Kushner anywhere near the WH or doing work for Trump. In fact Kushner probably belongs in jail. Anyone who defends him is probably being disingenuous.

>broke the norm of releasing tax returns

First of all, not a requirement. Secondly, his base of supporters did not care. Third, there's still time to do it technically speaking.

>broke the norm of completely divesting from businesses

I believe it was found that he doesn't actually have to do this.

>campaign's ties to Cambridge Analytica, which illegally retained information from Facebook, and has illegally framed politicians in the past and created fake news campaigns (esp in African countries)

Didn't it also come out that the Obama campaign did the same thing in 2012? With Facebooks knowledge and permission no less? I'm not entirely up to date on what exactly the situation with this thing is but from what I can tell this sort of thing is not unique to Trump.

>disregard for flagrant lying and never apologizing or retracting (retweeted fake statistics on black crime, fake videos of Muslim extremism, fake numbers for his inauguration, popular vote, could go on and on)

I'd like to direct you to the book SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. The book has a lot of useful information in it but one lesson that must be remembered is you never apologize to the types of people Trump is dealing with. Here's what Vox has to say about apologizing (emphasis added by me),

"The third thing to remember when undergoing an SJW-attack is to never apologize for anything you have done. I repeat: do not apologize. Do not say you are sorry if anyone's feelings were hurt, do not express regret, remorse, or contrition, do not say anything that can be taken as an apology in any way. Just in case I am not being sufficiently clear, do not apologize!


Normal people seek apologies because they want to know that you feel bad about what you have done and that you will at least attempt to avoid doing it again in the future. They seek apologies within the context of an expectation of a better future relationship with you. This is why it is important to apologize to normal people you have harmed in some way, so that you can mutually repair the damaged relationship through the bonding process of repentance and forgiveness. When we sincerely apologize to those we have inadvertently offended, this process actually strengthens the relationship and often leads to improved mutual understanding.


None of that applies to SJWs. They don't care how you feel, they don't care about your future behavior, they don't expect to have a future relationship with you, and there is absolutely no chance they are going to forgive you for anything. You are, after all, a dangerous thought-criminal. When they push you for an apology after pointing-and-shrieking at you, what they are seeking is a confession to bolster their indictment. They are like the police down at the station with a suspect in the interrogation room, badgering him to confess to the crime. And like all too many police these days, the SJWs don't really care if you did it or not, they're just looking for a confession that they can take to the prosecutor.
This means that every apology, every compromise, and every attempt to find common ground will be viewed as a display of weakness, a lack of confidence, and damning evidence in the case concerning which they intend to prosecute you.


Therefore, the correct answer to a demand for an apology is always no. “Wouldn't it only make sense if....” No. “Can't we just....” No. “Wouldn't it be fair to....” No. “You have to admit....” No. “If you would just apologize....” No. “Don't you realize you hurt....” No.
Look at Hunt. Look at Eich. Look at everyone in your personal experience who has come under attack by SJWs. Did apologizing do them any good at all? Did apologizing reduce the intensity of the attacks on them, or did the SJWs keep attacking? An apology is not going to relieve the pressure on you, it is only going to increase it. To the SJW, an apology is merely the first step in the ritual act of abasement and submission, after which one must recant any previously expressed doubts about the Narrative and declare one's intentions of future adherence to it.

It is very educational to see what happens when one simply refuses to fall in line with their demands. A refusal to play along with their game quickly strips the mask of sanity from their faces and reveals the angry, shrieking madness underneath. Never forget that they have no certainty of a win without your compliance. So do not, under any circumstances, comply with any of their demands. Do not, under any circumstances, apologize, not even if you feel genuinely bad about what you have done or if you suspect you may have genuinely hurt someone's feelings.
Remember, they don't believe in forgiveness. They don't believe in repentance. All they are looking for is for you to condemn yourself so the show trial can begin. As one SJW has put it: “Apologies are not merely the end of a bad situation. They are the beginning of a promise to do (and be) better.” So don't be under the false impression that an apology will put an end to anything. It will only serve as the start of the next stage of their attack.

Be aware that once they have launched an attack on you, they will press you hard for an apology and repeatedly imply that if you will just apologize, all will be forgiven. Do not be fooled! I have seen people fall for it time and time again, and the result is always the same. The SJWs are simply looking for a public confession that will confirm their accusations, give them PR cover, and provide them with the ammunition required to discredit and disemploy you. Apologizing will accomplish nothing more than hand them the very weapons they require to destroy you."

>broke the norm for campaign finance laws (paying Stormy Daniels 130k with it)

I don't know about this. The whole thing with Stormy I couldn't care less about but if he paid it from his campaign coffers I'm pretty sure that's wrong and would like it if he paid it back.

>broke the norm of caring about the Hatch Act (Kellyanne Conway promoting Ivanka's clothing line, supporting campaigns as a federal agent)

This was wrong as well. Kellyanne should have been fined or something.

>broke the norm of having a competent staff with low turnover: has not filled extremely important positions, such as ambassador to SK, turnover is around 50%, three times that of Obama's, while it's typical to have partisan picks, it's atypical for them to be so incompetent, conflicts of interest (Ajit Pai) and without the background for it (DeVos, Carson, etc), also tries to get staff to sign illegal NDAs

I think the high turnover is a good thing. As for not filling positions. You can thank Democrat obstruction in the Senate for that. They aren't confirming his nominations.

>fired the people investigating him (Comey, McCabe, attempted Mueller)

He was within his rights to fire Comey. Comey himself said so. He didn't fire McCabe or Mueller.

>general lack of goodwill and presidential behavior (let's be real, no one tells their kids to be like our POTUS), uses his position to shout down and bully private citizens in a personal, immature way, before we used to care that the POTUS was a "good person", instead, we have someone who has bragged about cheating on all 3 wives (in public, in interviews, for decades)

Are you sure no one tells their kids to be like Trump? Are you very sure? I somehow think that's not true. As for "bullying" private citizens. I think most of what you're implying here is about the rude motherfuckers that come to his rallies to interrupt (and/or attack his supporters)? If so they deserve the verbal beat down they got and worse. There's a time and place for that kind of thing and those were neither the times nor the places.

>Do you think the erosion of these norms are dangerous?

No. I think in many ways it's what Trump was elected to do. He's here to smash the Establishment and shake things up. What that means I'm not always sure and I probably wont always approve but I understand it's what he was elected for.

>What if a crazy Democrat runs in 2020...

I think if any Democrat wins the presidency in the next 20-50 years this country is probably doomed. Actually it's probably doomed anyway. Trump was just the last person fighting for the impossibility of saving us from ourselves.

>I wouldn't want any future POTUS to act like Trump, would you?

We wont be so lucky to have a President even emulate Trump again in our lifetimes I think.

Worth the read.

Vox Day deserves some love: https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

And if you want to know more (and the science behind it) read Cuckservative: How "Conservatives" Betrayed America

Absolutely. It's short, but Singer manages to make the most of it, in my opinion. I'm not sure whether it satisfies OPs demand for a book to "tackle Marx's arguments in the modern world", though. It's more of an introduction to Marx's thought.

His short introduction to Hegel is the best I've read in the series, by the way.

/u/ksan recently wrote a good piece that lists a number of introductory texts for Hegel here. I'm currently in the middle of reading Beiser's Hegel and it's very manageable. If you want something lighter, I'd recommend starting with this first but it is a very short introduction. Whilst it's a hundred pages or so you'll be left feeling like you just read an abstract. You should be able to find a copy of both texts online in PDF form without any trouble.

At the very least, you'll probably want to get a grasp of what the structure of Phenomenology PoR is and what Hegel is trying to convey before Marx's Contribution will make any sense.

Peter Singer devotes a chapter to this in Hegel: A Very Short Introduction. If you don't have the book, go to the Amazon link here, open up the book by clicking on it, and go to page 32.

hmmm, it depends, do you have any background in philosophy? If so I would recommend some more academic theological work like Kathryn Tanner, Leonardo Boff, Borden Bowne, Edgar Brightman, Jurgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Karl Barth, etc... if not I would recommend a book like this to help you understand the philosophical framework most theologians use.

As for Biblical studies, Michael Coogan has a really good intro to the Hebrew Bible and Mark Powell has a great intro to the New Testament you can supplement those readings with work focused on the historical context like Richard Horsely's work Jesus and Empire I haven't found a good book that offers a comprehensive overview of the context of the Hebrew Bible, mostly because that covers a large span of history. From there you can go on to read people like E.P. Sanders, William Herzog, Richard Bauckham, Jon Levenson, John Collins, Adela Collins, Carol Meyers, etc.

There is a ton of great academic work out there, unfortunately many seem to shy away from it because its 1) intimidating or 2) challenges embedded theological assumptions or 3) they buy into the myth that learning about theology and biblical studies only causes people to lose faith.

> Not beyond philosophy of science and picking up the occasional book (Singer, Nieztche, some Eastern oriented stuff) and a decent amount of political philosophy.

Ah, OK. You should maybe consider reading Think, an introduction to philosophy by Simon Blackburn. It's a good read, but more importantly, it's short and accessible.
If you want something more focused on ethics, I suggest Blackburn again with Being Good. Also short and accessible.

> The claim that 2 + 2 = 4 seems much more concrete than the claim that 'killing is bad.'

I would agree ("2 + 2 = 4" is a priori, the other is most likely a posteriori), but I am not arguing that killing is bad, I was just demonstrating that something relatively uncontroversial, like "killing is wrong", cannot be applied in a world where ethics is just subjective.

> Can one choose to just not care about right/wrong?

Sure - what one does is separate from the discussion of theory. One could believe 2 + 2 = 60 even! :D

> instead choosing to focus on the result of such behavior and how it ultimately harms oneself.

Sounds a lot like utilitarianism :-) You should read up on ethical theory - I think you would enjoy it.

Do you have a specific interest? Otherwise a general introduction like Think, Problems of Philosophy, or Justice are all well regarded. Though, all have their strengths and weaknesses. There are tons of accessible introductions though and depending on your interests it might be better to use one rather than another. All of those are fairly general

> So most an-caps would agree that the societies would be run with natural rights as the rule of the land, how though does one prove that humans even have rights?

Not all an-caps derive their beliefs from natural rights, and there are different understandings of the term 'natural rights.' In any case, here are what I think are some good resources:

• [Ethical Intuitionism][1]
  
• [The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey][2]
  
• A Positive Account of Property Rights
  
  [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Intuitionism-M-Huemer/dp/0230573746
  [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examination-Coerce/dp/1137281650
  

AFAIK most of the philosophers are moral realists whether they're atheist or theist. Also Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism may be change your view on morality.

This is a tangential point and doesn't really answer your question, but just want to chime in to say that the research seems to show that nonviolent resistance is about twice as effective than violent resistance in bringing down authoritarian regimes (Chenoweth has done the most famous research on this). I'm not familiar enough with the research to to know all of the qualifiers and caveats to this generalization, but it seems to be a pretty big difference in effectiveness.

This is a very general question, but let me try to point you to what you might be looking for.

If you're looking for people's attitudes on Harper, you can check out this thread from a little while back.

If you're looking for people's ideas on any particular policy, you can either do a search of this subreddit, or ask that question yourself!

If you're looking for people's philosophies, as dmcg12 said, those will be evident if you keep an eye on frequent posters; the more you see them write, the more coherent your picture of their ideas will be. If you're looking at philosophies rather than policies, though, there are philosophers who have produced better arguments than any of us here are likely to be able to articulate in support of their own stances (or at least, they've articulated them in greater detail than I think any of us have done). Some of the best books I've ever read are this (by a Canadian liberal egalitarian/social democrat), this (by a libertarian), and this (by an ex-Marxist Catholic conservative-in-a-way-that's-different-from-most-people-who-call-themselves-conservative). Of those three, I'd start with the Kymlicka, and read at least the chapters on Utilitarianism, Liberal Egalitarianism, and Libertarianism before deciding whether to put down the book. If, however, you take a look at Kymlicka or either of those other books and are intimidated, this does a fabulous job of explaining in accessible language what sort of things people might disagree on, without very strongly coming down on one side or another of such disagreements; it also has outstanding suggestions for further reading. All these books should be in any university library.

What kinds of deductive reasoning? I'd recommend practice and study of a specific application of deduction over reading about it in general.

I've played several games that require deduction:

• Flow Free: Android iOS
  
• Hashi: Android iOS
  
• Slitherlink: Android iOS
  
• Paint By Numbers/Hanjie: Web (can be printed for pencil and paper), Web
  
• Electric Box: Web, requires Flash
  
  Other examples are Logic grids, Sudoku, and many others.
  
  I find that deduction is a skill that's easy to develop in a particular domain (like any of the above games), but hard to generalize. Playing the above games for fun, I've developed a better understanding of how to use proof by contradiction, but not much else.
  
  Those kinds of high-level ideas are probably best learned from a logic textbook like Introduction to Logic, but the abstract knowledge may not translate to practical skills without domain-specific practice and study.

The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher is a fantastic book for a beginning philosopher. It explores some really deep topics in a very accessible way. Even if you don't understand all the explanations, the stories will really make you think (and you can mess with your friends by asking them what they would do). Good luck!

For those new to philosophy, I'd recommend The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher, as well as Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar. I'm not all the way through the second one but it seems interesting. These are fairly simple but interesting introductory books that teach you some of the issues philosophers deal with.

Hope this helps!

Referring to them as "Friend 1", "Friend 2", and so on seems a bit dehumanizing/clinical, no?

I any case, I think lists of questions are great under the right circumstances -- I've made ample use of them on long road trips and hiking trips on occasion, and they've provided a springboard for plenty of 10-15 hour long conversations. I think one issue with the ones you're using is that a lot of them are really boring and don't really provide fertile ground for followup discussion. I've probably most enjoyed going through Greg Stock's books (e.g. 1, 2, 3, which you can pick up used for a few bucks each), as well as the "If..." series and books of thought experiments. Each question usually provides 5-120 minutes of conversation, with median time being, I dunno, 15ish minutes.

And I'll second recommendations on getting out and doing other things while conversing with people in person. It doesn't have to be too active -- a walk will do.

do you have any light reading philosphy books? So far all I've read is "The pig who loves to be eaten" https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452287448/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_oXU0DbS4WCZ0F

Try The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten by Julian Baggini. Link here

Baggini's The Pig That Wants to be eaten is an excellent and fun start for thinking about general philosophical problems, which is, naturally, an excellent introduction to philosophy.

If you're looking for something more rigorous, Russell's The Problems of Philosophy is a tiny and very well-written guide to philosophy almost up to the modern day by arguably the greatest thinker in analytical philosophy of the last century.

Here's another one: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-female-power-masculinist-dissection/dp/9782651052

I haven't read it though. It seems like quite the meme.

Also: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512

Actually throughout history females were much, much more likely to survive to adulthood and reproduce. And they have always had their own set of privileges and their own forms of power.

Speaking of books/papers:

The Privileged Sex

The Myth of Male Power

Female forms of power and the myth of male dominance

Favored or Oppressed?

The Legal Subjugation of Men (1908)

The Boy Crisis

Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men

Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men

The Second Sexism: Discrimination Against Men and Boys

Gender differences on automatic in group bias: whey do women like women more than men like men?

Sex Differences in the Ultimatum Game: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective

Intrasexual Competition Shapes Men’s Anti-Utilitarian Moral Decisions

Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism

The Gender Empathy Gap: Chivalry is not dead when it comes to morality

Note that with the exception of the first link, which leads to an historical study of female privilege written by a right wing military strategist, all of these books and papers were written by liberals and socialists.

Another recent [study](Objectivity and realms of explanation in academic journal articles concerning sex/gender: a comparison of Gender studies and the other social sciences) (conducted in Sweden, of all places) concluded that 'gender studies' is by far the most unscientific and biased discipline in all of the social sciences and possibly all of academia. Basically, if you've learned about gender solely through the lens of feminism, you've been wildly misinformed.

Have you read any of Peter Singer's books? He's a utilitarian philosopher who doesn't just stick to atheism, but covers all sorts of very challenging ground including abortion, euthanasia, animal rights and so on. I don't agree with every position he takes, but he's the best introduction to those squirming issues that I've ever found.

If you're interested, start with Practical Ethics. It's the one university Ethics papers use as an introductory text.

NukeThePope often suggests this book:

https://nukeexcathedra.jottit.com/2011-03-09%3A_book_review%3A_sense_%26_goodness_without_god

Not exactly 'how to be successful' but it is about morality

some other suggestions:

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211?tag=dudugo-20

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521707684/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1315260344&sr=8-2


http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

(not about morality, but it will help you to avoid being gullible, which would help with the success thing)

I'd recommend the following:

• For a good survey, see the history of utilitarianism by Julia Driver at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  
• Utilitarianism is a specific type of Consequentialism, so I'd check out an article at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.
  
• For the historical roots in Bentham and Mill (who laid the foundation), Troyer's The Classical Utilitarians is a good anthology.
  
• For something a bit more readable and contemporary, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics is a classic.

Steve Hick's "Explaining Postmodernism" was reccomended to me the last time this came up on this sub (and is layman friendly for the most part) The publisher has released the audio version for free on youtube. (around 6 hrs total)

Goes through the historical roots of the movement (revival of early theological anti-enlightenment philosophy) and how the post modernist lens shapes ones worldview.

He's critical of post modernism (for the same reasons sam is) but focuses on explaining the base assumptions and precepts of the movement

Which is self is part of the larger, post-modern war on truth, facts and reason.

When reality is not on your side, deny reality.
This has been the nature of the left for a long, long time.
Philosophy has been corrupted since Plato, with a major wrong turn by the granddaddy of postmodernism, Immanuel Kant.

The Frankfurt School simply applied this nonsense to various disciplines.

For an overview of the wrong turns of philosophy, and how that has played out in various disciplines (economics, politics, art, etc.) I would recommend Piekoff's The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights Are Going Out in the West

Just started Explaining Postmodernism; looks as though it will be interesting!

Postmodern thought, which is infecting public discourse and is perhaps most prevalent within educational institutions, dictates that there are no individuals, only collective groups which we all belong to. Postmodern thinkers are obsessed with power, and with separating humans even from these groups into further sub-groups, and pitting those sub groups against each other – as the dominant and the submissive, the oppressor and the oppressed.

It’s this rejection of individual responsibility, and obsession with sub-group dominance hierarchies, which leads to the defence of Shamima Begum. There are those who say she cannot be held fully accountable because of the young age at which she joined ISIS, or plead mercy because she is pregnant. If she repented her actions, or displayed even the slightest hint of regret for her treachery, then perhaps I would have more sympathy for these arguments.

But what is really at the heart of her defence is a willingness to infer victimhood on any enemy of the West. If you listen closely to those on the far left, especially in academia, you will find a deep resentment of western societies, and a perverse forgiveness and understanding of her enemies.

The postmodern worldview holds that individuals are not responsible for their actions, but are either victims or villains based on their sub-group category. This world view positions Begum as a victim of evil western imperialism, since she was born into a particular group which has been oppressed, and cannot be held accountable for the decisions she has made. This line of thinking led Jean-François Lyotard, a postmodernist philosopher, to conclude that “Saddam Hussein (was) a product of Western departments of state and big companies”.

In order to understand how someone could draw such a ridiculous conclusion, we need to understand exactly how and why postmodern philosophy came about. During the latter half of the 20th century, it became strikingly obvious to the intellectual community that by any rational measure, communism had failed. Stephen Hicks hypothesises that left-wing academics had two choices: either to accept that communism had failed, or to construct a new way of measuring reality which would allow for communism to work. They chose the latter.

Communist apologists were presented with an overwhelming amount of evidence which rendered their political philosophy a crime against humanity. The collapse of the Soviet Union and revelations of the horrors of its death camps were enough to persuade many that communism had failed.

Left-wing academics had to give Marxism a makeover. Evidence and logic proved that socialist and communist societies have failed – but what if we simply reject logic and reason? Postmodern thinkers started to claim that everyone’s experience of the world is subjective, and that our knowledge is based on a group identity, which we cannot escape from. By rejecting reason, rejecting evidence, and dismissing the truth as subjective, postmodernist thinkers could dismiss the evidence against socialism and communism.

Furthermore, this commitment to collective group identities allowed for a new Marxist power struggle. They argue that some group identities are oppressed, and should rise up against their oppressors. Instead of the working class vs the  bourgeois, postmodern thought pitches race against race, gender against gender, and so on.

Thousands of words could be written about how postmodernists have given communist ideas a makeover, and I’ll be discussing this in more detail at an event in London this evening. For the purpose of this article, it is enough to say that their worldview which is based on group identity allows them to blame everything – even joining a terrorist group like ISIS – on the West.

Postmodernists and the far left are united in their hatred of Western civilisation. During the 2017 election, Jeremy Corbyn blamed the terrorist attacks such as the Manchester bombing on British foreign policy. Andrew Murray, a friend of Len McCluskey’s and advisor to the Labour Party, blamed the formation of ISIS on Western imperialism. The far left side with Britain’s enemies because they view them as victims, not as individuals responsible for their own actions.

Last week’s reaction to the story about Begum was a perfect example of this philosophy in action. Begum, a young girl who joins a terrorist group which has burnt alive pilots, beheaded journalists and thrown gay people off buildings, is apparently a victim. However, if you’re a straight white male who has sent some questionable tweets a few years ago, you are the villain, and there can be no understanding or forgiveness.

I’m sickened by this postmodern morality, and so every person reading this article should be. This worldview doesn’t allow for the fair judgement of human beings, based on the content of their character. Rather, it forgives the wrongs of individuals belonging to ‘oppressed’ groups, and blames all the world problems on the ‘oppressors’, i.e. the West. There are those who criticise British and American foreign policy, and in many cases rightly so, but it is only the extreme left which go so far as to infer victimhood on our enemies.

Our modern society has been founded on enlightenment ideals: a respect for knowledge and science, and a respect for the individual. Societies that respect these rights of the individual to produce, and buy and sell what they choose, far outperform societies which do don’t. That is why so many who take up arms against the West are quite keen to return to Britain to enjoy far superior living standards.

So the next time you hear someone attack western societies as oppressive or responsible for all the evils in the world, understand that, for many, this is based on an intense resentment that the capitalist west disproved socialist and communist theory. Postmodern philosophy is an intellectually bankrupt attempt to re-write history and position the societies which promote individual freedom and democracy as the ‘bad guys’.

I'd have to say a great place to start is with Dr. Stephen Hicks' Explaining Post-Modernism (2006). If you search the title on YouTube, you can find the full audio book available for streaming.

Awesome, let me hook you up:

Murray N. Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty, the indepth treatise on liberty in a society without the State. And the audiobook.

Chaos Theory by Robert P. Murphy (Audio). Shorter work on the principles of liberty and expands on the economic aspects.

Anarcho-capitalism Primer videos playlist. There are about 4 or 5 shorter than 10 minutes for you to chill. And there are the in-depth, one-hour lectures for when you are in between the books.

Rothbard's For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto. Rothbard poured a lifetime of research and all his intellectual energy to makes an overwhelming case on most matters of social concerns to explain society without the Nation-state (Audiobook).

The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman (e-book) and (audiobook). Friedman uses economics and utilitarian concerns to discuss how society would improve with liberty and without the State.

The Market for Liberty by Morris and Linda Tannehill (audiobook.) Excellent and very argumentative, with many interesting illustrations and discussions on several topics of society and economics.

Huemer's Problem of Political Authority. It is a work on political and moral philosophy, with some treatment of psychology.

Leeson's Anarchy Unbound. Peter Leeson is a legal scholar and his work documents historical and contemporary legal practices and teachings and how they apply to a society of liberty.

Christopher Chase Rachels' A Spontaneous Order. Inspired by the work of Hans-Hermann Hoppe on argumentation ethics as an ultimate foundation for liberty. First five chapters available as audio.

For a more complete list see Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

When you read one of them, I suggest for you to write up a short post on your favourite subjects. It is a great way way to have productive discussions. Don't forget to tag me ( /u/anon338 ) so that I can enjoy it also.

Your very first comment you spouted off a bunch of different unsubstantiated points like dogma. What were you trying to achieve there? The whole thing needed some focus.

You're not going to break their belief in the legitimacy of government in a single paragraph, pick a point, an angle of attack and stick to it.

As for countering the social contract theory, pick up Michael Huemer's book. It does a great job of breaking down the arguments.

Short answer: https://mises.org/library/anatomy-state

Long answer: https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examination-Coerce/dp/1137281650

Very insightful comment, thank you. I don't find a lot I can disagree with here...it certainly softens, at least, the level to which I think hypocrisy is likely taking place.

As an aside, and just because you delved in to the whole collective vs. individual rights thing, you might be interested to explore what I call the intuitionist moral philosophy of political legitimacy. I believe that it successfully finds hybrid of deontological and consequentialist positions, and it is what I largely adhere to in my personal moral code as it regards rights and political authority.

I only know of it in book form The Problem of Political Authority , so assuming you're not going to buy it, I can suggest this decent review, and also access to the first chapter

I won't claim to agree with Michael Huemer, but his book The Problem of Political Authority is a modern look into the origins of political authority and covers the social contract.

I'd highly recommend you to read The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer.

It's well written and based off a lot of analogies and metaphors to prove the certain legitimacy of the existence of a central government in a society in an unbiased way.

9/10.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

Without a doubt The Problem of Political Authority. It's explains things so clearly and convincingly, you'll wonder how you ever tried explaining libertarianism another way.

If you could provide us with a bit more information about the course, it might be easier for us to make recommendations. For example, is the course you're planning on taking an intro course or an upper level course?

Regardless of the content of the course, however, I think that something like The Philosopher's Toolkit would be a great pickup. Probably much more useful than any single historical work that you might think to pick up. You can also readily find PDF versions of it online, if you know where to look.

It depends on if you want to learn about "philosophy" as in the ideas that philosophers have put down and discussed, or if you want "philosophy" as a method of working with those (or any) ideas. Personally, I've always been more interested in philosophy as a method, so if you'd like to eventually be able to have meaningful discourse on philosophical subjects, something like The Philosopher's Toolkit would be a worthwhile read.

There are a couple ways I envision this conversation could go and I don't know which you'd prefer (if any)

1. I respond to your direct comments
   
2. We investigate what you seem to believe
   
   I'm going with 1 since 2 is more personal and only partially on topic.
   
   > How is this done without defining the parameters for morals and ethics?
   
   This was defined up front as in the context of utilitarian ethical system. If you don't subscribe to a utilitarian ethical or moral framework, then this won't be convincing. That is independent of the fact that you used the word human for something that Singer wouldn't use the same word for. One is a human on a biological categorization level, the other is a different classification that has to do with moral status. Using the same word for both would be confusing and lead to miscommunications.
   
   > This is a value problem that's a trick question
   
   No its not. It is an extreme hypothetical meant to clarify what you believe. From there you investigate what lead to your decision. If your answer is they have the same value, I have a follow up question to tease out what you mean by that (or if you really mean that). And if it is really true, what the consequences of that belief would be that I (and maybe you) would find surprising.
   
   > Answer: They all deserve to live...
   
   This doesn't answer the question. It says a fair amount about what you believe anyways (no one on earth is qualified, etc) but doesn't answer the question. And how you feel about a situation, generally, doesn't hold a lot of weight by comparison to action. Letting them both burn to death but feeling twice as guilty would not, I imagine, be thought of as the moral thing to do by most people.
   
   > Their high utility is from an unspecified unmeasurable potential, thus judging morality from a potential, not a concrete.
   A concrete answer, is that all of them have the same limitless potential, and to decide someone's potential is murder
   Just like abortion
   
   This is just nonsensical. You have decided that all people have the same unlimited potential, and that the potential matters more than or as much as the actual. And simply deciding someone's potential is murder. There are just so many problems with this statement. I'll list a few:
   
   
3. Not all people have unlimited potential, even if I'm very generous in interpreting what you mean by "unlimited". The brain dead person does not have unlimited potential. The 106 year old does not have unlimited potential. Certainly their potential is different than that of a newborn child.
   
4. Using "potential" as the measure of the importance of a thing has ridiculous consequences. The old arguments of condoms destroying potential futures is a classic. But even things like people not living up to their potential would be morally wrong. Is it unethical to be lazy? Or would it be unethical to give up on your own dreams in favor of your family member's dream? How do you compare two "unlimited" potentials? How do we maximize for the most moral good in the "potential" regime? It would seem that maximizing the number of humans would maximize the pool of potentials. Should we create breeding factories to accomplish this? Is rape justifiable as it has the potential to create a child?
   
5. Deciding potential is murder? If two people come into the ER after a car accident, both are dying, and the Dr makes a judgement call as to which he has the best chance to save, did he murder the other person? When college admission boards choose who to accept or give scholarships to, did they murder those they decided had less potential? Job interviews? Guidance counselors? If a parent requires one student to work so the other can go to school, murderers?
   
6. How does one know what is right and avoid murder if both decisions are bad? This is why I asked the fire question. Situations exist where two people's lives are at stake, and you can save 1, but not both. And no decision results in death of both. This is actually not entirely rare in pregnancy.
   
7. How does someone know when potential exists? For example, if you believe that human level intelligence AI is possible, how do you know what machine AI will result in this new AI? (this assumes you think a human level intelligence AI would have moral standing, if you don't think this that is yet another interesting tangent).
   
8. Can someone be forced to give up autonomy in all cases to maximize potential for others? Forced kidney donations? Forced bone marrow donation? Forced organ donation on death? Forced egg and sperm donation?
   
   This response has gotten quite long. Please feel free to respond or not, or we can delve into your beliefs. I'm not personally a staunch utilitarian, so I'm mostly providing the argument as I understand it. If you find the argument interesting but don't want to argue on the internet, I would suggest you either read
   
   

• Singer's book or
  
• take a perusal through the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy.
  
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/#IdeAppEth
  
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
  
• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grounds-moral-status/

"Justice: What's the right thing to do?" by Michael Sandel is a good book for an overview of different approaches to ethics.

"Practical Ethics" by Peter Singer is the one that really first made me think there's good reason to pick a side.

Ethics for dummies.

Absolute morality:

There is exactly one set of rules by which God expects you to live, and if you do that's good and if you don't that's evil.

This approach suffers from the following problems:

1. God is unchanging, the Bible doesn't rewrite itself, so those rules are eternal, unchanging and incapable of improvement. To illustrate this,
   
2. God is a genocidal psychopath. He doesn't care about large-scale suffering and thinks nothing of killing or otherwise punishing innocents. He condones punishment by proxy and appreciates human sacrifice. Aspects of God's behavior as presented in the Bible strike most sane people as intolerable and incompatible with a respect-worthy moral standard.
   
   This is a bit of a conundrum: because Christian apologists inform us that our sense of morality is God-given. If our God-given sense of morality tells us that God is an asshole, something must be wrong.
   
   As a result of this, Christians all over the world cheerfully ignore most of God's absolute morals as set out in the Bible. This raises the interesting question: what gives them the authority to override God's alleged word? If societies agree that socially evolved morals are "better" than those in the Bible, then where does that leave God and his unchanging, absolutely authoritative word?
   
   

   Consequentialism:
   

   
   A majority of sane people, even those who pay lip service to God's rules, apply a follow a Consequentialist ethic: if your contemplated action is likely to harm someone, or do more harm than good, then don't do it! If you could do something to make others (and maybe yourself) lead a better, happier life (even if only a bit) then give positive consideration to doing that thing!
   
   As a start, it's really that simple. This principle allows people to talk about the pros and cons of any contemplated action, and to make, in a flexible and universal manner, an informed decision about whether an action should be undertaken or not.
   
   There is some devil in the details, and the basic idea of Consequentialism has a number of branches, the best known of which is probably Utilitarianism. The thing to note is that different schools of ethical thought may lead to different conclusions for difficult moral dilemmas, but they mostly reach a consensus about the big things: murder is bad, as is slavery, rape, discrimination and so on.
   
   Philosophers of ethics write books about this stuff. They are widely ignored by the American public because simple-minded religious folk think that the Bible is a suitable source of moral instruction.
   
   My recommendation for an educational and thought-provoking secular treatment on ethics is Peter Singer's Practical Ethics.

Peter Singer's arguments concerning extreme poverty convinced me to donate a portion of my income to highly effective charities a long time ago, long before I started pursuing FI. And while I view FIRE as a goal worth striving for, I view donating to charity as a moral imperative. That's my reason for continuing to donate to charity. It's just more important to me.

If you'd like to learn more, check out this TED Talk by William MacAskill.

David Benatar is pretty well known for explicitly arguing that having children is unethical (see his *Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence)

Peter Singer is phenomenal for his breadth of topics, he does discuss the ethics of overpopulation and consumption fairly regularly (see this little speech or his book The Life You Can Save: How to Do Your Part to End World Poverty).

Other than that, as TychoCelchuuu suggests, the SEP is a good place to start.

Peter Singer talked about this in 'The Life You Can Save'

http://smile.amazon.com/Life-You-Can-Save-Poverty/dp/0812981561/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427395966&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+you+can+save

I'm sure some people here have some strong opinions on him [I do too] but I actually do recommend this book.

Reading this book would be a good intro to the problem:

https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1518811680&sr=8-1&keywords=stephen+hicks&linkCode=ll1&tag=epact&linkId=3b483174b8852dfc6e2d3c8f6139fd9e

For a really good introduction (from a critical perspective), I recommend Stephen Hicks's book Explaining Postmodernism.

Watch the lecture I attached, where a top philosophy professor is interviewed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwW9QV5Ulmw&t=1652s

Dr. Stephen R. C. Hicks (www.stephenhicks.org), Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois, USA, Executive Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, and Senior Scholar at The Atlas Society in August of 2017 (http://bit.ly/306ggDQ), and decided that it was time for an update. Dr. Hicks received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. He has published four books, translated into sixteen different languages: • In 1994; 2nd ed 1998 The Art of Reasoning: Readings for Logical Analysis (co-edited with David Kelley, W. W. Norton & Co., 1994, second edition 1998). • In 2010, Nietzsche and the Nazis • In 2016, Entrepreneurial Living (co-edited with Jennifer Harrolle) The remaining book, published in 2004 and expanded in 2011, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, has been particularly relevant to our discussions. It’s available at Amazon.com (https://amzn.to/2Jh4Uro) but also in pdf form on Dr. Hick’s website (http://bit.ly/2MaI9rH). I found it very helpful when trying to understand the intellectual roots of the ideas that appear so dominant in today’s universities.

If you think it's still possible to expand upon what you already know, you could start here. You can even pick your favorite discipline:

* Philosophy: Stephen Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault.

* Literature: John Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities.

* History: Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History.

* Science: Noretta Koertge, editor, A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science.

* Law: Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law.

​

Or you could just accept that one does not need advanced degrees in philosophy to study, understand, analyze and interpret it - not to mention TO philosophize - and read this: https://jordanbpeterson.com/philosophy/postmodernism-definition-and-critique-with-a-few-comments-on-its-relationship-with-marxism/

Det finns olika grupperingar inom feminismen, men den som har varit på uppsving de senaste åren har ett otäckt förhållningssätt till objektivitet, logik ("uppfunnet av vita män för att förtrycka") etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPnUOcsjqgA för en kort redogörelse
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406 för en längre, aktuell dissektion.

Troligen är det det nuvarande största hotet mot det moderna samhället.

The recommended book:

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0983258406

> First off, they were civil penalties, not criminal ones.

Actually, it's both.

> the only reason it would violate peoples' right to free speech is because the American government decided that "Money = Speech"

They recognized that the two are inseparable. Expressing your political beliefs with your mouth in your home or on the street isn't the only kind of activity protected under the "right to free speech." You cannot separate free speech from the freedom to use the platforms on which speech occurs, and the platforms on which speech occurs cost money. There is no difference in terms of "power of censorship" between a government who maintains the right to ban media productions which cost money vs. a dictator who bans media on a whim -- both would have essentially absolute authority to ban virtually any piece of media.

Suppose the Trump administration banned the release of the following pieces of media by threat of civil and criminal penalties, using the F.E.C.'s logic in the Citizens United case as legal support:

• Jon Oliver's "Last Week Tonight"
  
• Michael Moore's documentaries
  
• The Daily Show
  
• Union pamphlets in support of Bernie Sanders
  
• Thomas Paine's "Common Sense", published by, say, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, or some other publishing corporation . (Or perhaps a hypothetical modern day equivalent to Paine's pamphlet?)
  
  Would you consider it a violation of free speech to restrict these pieces of media based on the money spent on them?
  
  > In pretty much any other country
  
  Most other countries don't value free speech.
  
  > not the actual act of making the movie, but having it on TV and advertising it
  
  If Trump banned your documentary criticizing him, would it be much consolation that the he didn't prevent you from making it, but only preventing you from showing it to people?
  
  > [I'd prefer access to socialized healthcare and free university education over the right to produce political ads].
  
  This isn't just about "political ads". The argument the F.E.C used was broad and sweeping and would give the government unilateral and uninhibited authority to block any speech it didn't like on any platform where people would actually see it. It might not sound scary when it was applied to a partisan documentary a few years ago, but court decisions are like laying bricks. And when a guy you don't like gets into power a few years down the road (or maybe many years), you might not like the ugly havoc he is able to wreak with the authority you have allowed him to have. So its incorrect to belittle its importance by phrasing it as "the right to produce political ads". No. It is the "right to free speech".
  
  In any case, the "trade off" question is ultimately a value question. To truly settle it would involve getting deeper into moral philosophy. I'll just say that my value system is very different than your value system, and under my value system, trading away free speech for a system where the government threatens to lock people in cages if they don't fund people's university educations or hospital bills is not worth it. This is especially true for education expenses. (In fact, you can already get a free education through the internet. You just won't have a piece of paper to show for it.)
  
  EDIT: Cut out some stuff to focus my message. Don't wanna get bogged down in side arguments.

You too. I recommend http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650 .

I promise you I will read your book (I've been meaning to), if you promise to read mine.

My comment was an attempt to answer your question, but I admit I didn't make that part very clear. Of course you can't just rely on people's goodness, because people are neither inherently good or evil. They follow incentives, and in a society where people move on from rulers, there would be natural incentives for people to try and get along even if they didn't like each other, as These guys explain as their solution.

Power and authority positions, on the other hand, are inherently defined by being able to do harm and damage to one group for the benefit of another without the threat of consequence, as this video explains. This is the kind of action that the Cycle of Hatred is based upon, and is why any real discussion of peace must question the structures of power that are involved. In contrast, a action of trade that happens between two people only occurs if both people see it as benefiting them, so the things and rules that occur are only what people agree on.

People have written whole novels about these concepts, and there are a lot to choose from, like this one, but feel free to look around.

Are you unfamiliar with the arguments of anarcho-capitalists on this topic? Have you read The Machinery of Freedom? Or The Problem of Political Authority? I'm not saying I agree with them altogether, but this seems like a rather shallow criticism.

The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer

Or you could just accept it :D! Kidding. You should critically evaluate everything (as you are doing).

I tried to make it fairly simple and intuitive, but I also have deeper philosophical reasons for holding these beliefs. In any case, the book garnering the most attention in professional political philosophy right now is The Problem of Political Authority by professor Michael Huemer.

You should buy it, or I can help subsidize you to buy it. Or, you could always pirate it :P But that lays out the argument in an incredibly cogent way. It is a real piece of scholarship, and it's an easy read. I know skeptical graduate students who are very impressed by the book. I think you will be too.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

The Problem of Political Authority (There isn't any)

This is the best argument I've read in support of taxation that acts as if the average an-cap isn't a lunatic.

Thank you for writing this up! You're raising the bar of discussion around here.

Since you wrote up on the idea of political authority, I wonder if you've read The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer.

I cannot summarize the whole thing here (the reviews on Amazon do it better) but I feel like he does a good line of reasoning on the topic, and it was this book that made me (reluctantly) give up the notion that a certain amount of government was required.

And I do mean "reluctantly". I'm already used to keeping my political views to myself, because even without being an an-cap, I am pretty fringe in my political views. This just pushed me even fringier.

(He specifically addresses Kant's arguments in support of political authority. It's really good reading!)

Thank you, again, for this awesome comment. You deserve far more than the six points upvotes you have right now.

Well then, go read The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer and The Machinery of Freedom by David Freidman.

Books won't downvote you, I promise.

Probably not. But you also have a positive obligation to do most things that liberal democratic states tell you to do.

"Nobody should be given the right to initiate violence against others without repercussions."

For clarity then, you believe that some people should have the right to initiate violence against others with zero repercussions?

>My definition of property doesn't matter. All that matters is that IF it is different than the AnCap one that AnCap will feel completely justified in taking what I think is mine and then possibly killing me when I try to take it back.

For anyone who is just getting started with the ideas of polycentric law and property rights I highly reccomend these two books.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650

http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

>I'm not sure why you're linking to extraordinary rendition. Canada has never used it.

The Canadian Military and Special Forces have murdered countless people without trial. The Canadian justice system has imprisoned countless people for victimless crimes. And you trust these people to not use their written power to extract you from a foreign country?

>It makes me feel as though you're making things up. Mind substantiating all of that.

To be clear, you don't believe that the Canadian Government has the right to Extraordinary Rendition of Canadian Citizens? That is your position?

>What a completely terrible argument. Wow. Even if I were, why would I think AnCap is a good idea. Greed is one of the worst human characteristics. Greed + unrestricted capitalism + 'justice' = BAD

For anyone who is new to economics I would highly reccomend this book. Sowell is not an AnCap but he is a genius that has an unmatched perspective on history, and economics.

http://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Common-Sense-Economy/dp/0465002609

>Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. Are you suggesting that Capitalism doesn't sometimes lead to a consolidation of wealth/power in the few who then subjugate the many?

Of course I am suggesting that. All of the wealth consolidation happens after Nation States get involved in Capitalism. It even has a name.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

>More like "When in Rome..."

If you keep insulting people on the sub then of course you are going to get a negative response. Maybe we should get a fresh start then? Stop insulting people and see what happens.

>Grow up.

It is apparent to myself and everyone else on this sub that you have not read the basics of the basics of AnCap literature. If you really want to stir things up then get some books under your belt and come back with arguments that are unique and thought provoking. The arguments you have put forth are tired and old. They have been posted a million times and refuted a million and one.

Imagine if Thomas Jefferson gave up because someone told him to grow up? You would be paying 80% of your income in taxes to some King who would be murdering and caging even MORE people than your current government does.

Have you read (or are you generally aware of) Huemer's Problem of Political Authority? If not, I'd recommend giving it a read. If so, what did you think of it?

https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Political-Authority-Examination-Coerce/dp/1137281650

I also recommend looking up Michael Huemer on Youtube. You could also buy his book
>http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1375155363&sr=8-1&keywords=the+problem+with+political+authority

although it is a bit pricey (but totally worth it).

This is a good empirical look at how anarcho-capitalism could work.

Huemer fully admits that getting there is problematic because it doesn't lever with human instincts and our natural tendencies. He proposes thousands of years of social engineering to get us there...good luck with that.

Here is the mobile version of your link

Recommended reading for you

I think the best general introduction to philosophy is Simon Blackburn's Think. It's fairly short and very readable, and it goes from topic to topic talking about both historical and contemporary approaches. This book also might helpful for OP.

Sophie's World is a good recommendation. If you don't want fiction, I'd suggest (and have in other, similar threads) Simon Blackburn's Think as a good, high-level overview of Philosophy. I'd also pick up a text specifically about logic and/or critical thinking that covers basic argument structure and the common fallacies (perhaps The Philosopher's Toolkit ). After reading those, you should have a grasp on both how philosophers do their thing as well as an overview of the various topics in philosophy. From there, you can start reading more about the areas that particularly interest you.

If you're actually curious how things could work, here's a good book to get started.

But again, realize that your position is that you will support immoral means and pretend they create moral ends.

https://smile.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607/

There are a myriad of solutions and literature on the matter.

Just because there exist government monopolies on the services you listed doesn't mean that it wouldn't be handled by the market.

People like order, don't they?

If you have doubts about why the state is so bad, and want to understand more what the state is Anatomy of the State by Murray Tothbard is a great read, got me into libertarianism in general

If you are looking for more current anarcho-capitalist theory and it’s logistics, a great read is The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman.

Anatomy of the state is a great introduction of about ~50 or so pages while The Machinery of freedom goes into a lot more detail, ~350 pages and is the book I would choose.

Hope this helps!

An-caps don't believe the government should run the military either (or the justice system).

If you want to get familiar with their ideal proposed system, you probably want to read something like The Machinery of Freedom which lays out how a non-state could work, including justice systems and defense.

Less extreme libertarians frequently leave the government in charge of providing public goods (problems that markets can't usually solve because you can't exclude people from the service once it's provided) and wish to keep it out of everything that isn't a public good.

Sounds like you missed anarcho-capitalism 101.

Ill get you started:

https://smile.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607

Bon, vu que tu as besoin d'être pris en main. Je cite Lauren Southern :

> "Oh, and another problem I have with Hitler? He fawned over Muslims more sycophantically than Justin Trudeau. Bibi Netanyahu was right to point out that Hitler decided on the Holocaust partly because Middle Eastern Muslims told him they didn’t want Jews expelled into the region.“

Blamer les musulmans pour l'holocauste, on fait difficilement plus islamophobe dans le genre. Surtout que ça provient de son bouquin au titre méga subtil : "Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigrants, and Islam Screwed My Generation" (Source : https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Boomers-Immigrants-Screwed-Generation/dp/1541136942)

C'est assez islamophobe pour que tu investisses du temps dans cette vidéo ou tu as des excuses toutes prêtes pour miss journaliste américaine du canada ? https://youtu.be/VUbxVfSqtt8

That's the liberal position, yes.

If you are interested in this topic and are willing to entertain a serious and secular defense of traditional marriage, the likes of which you will never be exposed to without seeking it out, here's a read:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Marriage-Man-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

Your views on marriage have been informed by pop culture. You can do better than that.

There are several verses on the topic that make it clear where the Bible stands. Since people get funny about the OT, let's just look at NT verses.

http://www.witnessfortheworld.org/homont.html

I'd also recommend you read What is Marriage? and Correct, Not Politically Correct. The "Correct" book is a really short read and has a useful Q&A section in the back. What is Marriage is more academic but still a great read. Interestingly, neither relies much on the Bible to make their convincing case for marriage.

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Edward Feser is a great place to start.

Yeah my understanding is that classical theism doesn't hold much truck with ontological arguments either. I once attended a lecture in which a guy tried to defend Anselm's ontological argument to a room full of Aristotelian Thomists, and the ensuing bloodbath was not edifying.

Definitely check out Feser if you have a background in philosophy. He just came out with a new book for the not-so-much-of-a-layman.

(edit: fixed link)

This is one of the primary reasons I enjoy Edward Feser's writings so much.

I will read that book if you read this book.

You should check out Edward Feser's books. He's a philosopher who specializes in Thomism and he has written several books about Thomist philosophy. His book Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide is a pretty clear introduction to Thomas Aquinas' work. If you're interested in the metaphysical aspects specifically, check out his book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.

You claimed that the double-slit experiment shows reality without a cause and that the behavior of the universe is statistical in nature.

I replied that this only proves that Aristotle and Aquinas were right that matter is potentiality and that material processes are necessarily indeterminate.

If you don't understand what I am talking about, you need to start looking into introductory texts in metaphysics and learning what they mean, rather than making bold claims about subjects that you admit to not understanding at all.

You might start here.

A simpler book.

>Also, where can I read more about Natural Law?

Edward Feser is very good at explaining it. Here's a blog post to get you started: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/10/whose-nature-which-law.html

And if you want to read more, I'd recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Scholastic-Metaphysics-Contemporary-Introduction-Scholasticae/dp/3868385444/ref=pd_sim_b_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=1PQZCBY62513VPV3H3SE

/u/Hurrah_for_Karamazov, I'm still following the discussion, and I'm impressed, I'm already looking forward to buy this book to start somewhere on this topic of metaphysics.

Do not feel bad or hurt by the unnecessary and pointless mean things this folk writes in some paragraphs of his replies or get impressed by the things written to play the victim card, as you may know already, it only shows how much he needs Christ in his life (because, some happy person wouldn't use such resources in a discussion; obviously there is something wrong with the anger of this friend). This folk should be keep in our prayers.

Please do not give up! I'm learning a lot of things with this discussion!!

For 1-5, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Edward Feser.

For 6 and anything else related to the basics of the Christian life, Christian history, or the church, I would suggest Introduction to Christianity by Pope Benedict the XVI (Joseph Ratzinger)

Hey, sorry I never replied to this! Aquinas is who I read, primarily. And the philosophers in his tradition who come after him. I think he probably presents the strongest arguments, but to consider them for what they actually are, you have to have a basic understanding of Aristotelian metaphysics. You're probably not looking for this, but I would recommend these books, in this order:

The Last Superstition

Aquinas (A "Beginner's" [quotes mine; not all that beginner-ish imo] Guide)

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction

The first one is a polemic, so beware. But it lays out a pretty decent modern cultural context for Scholastic metaphysics. That last one is especially good if you're interested in how science plays out in Thomism. The second one (and the bulk of the last one) though is kinda meaty technical stuff. But I think that series prepares you to understand the arguments of all different sorts of metaphysicians quite well.

It is a lot of work though. I won't deny that. It sort of pissed me off at first, but truth doesn't necessarily have to be easy to comprehend. Of course that's not to say that the difficulty of all this is meritorious or anything in itself.

This, and also the fact that any good right-wing comedian immediately becomes the target of a campaign to dissuade his sponsors by threatening a boycott. This stuff is right out of SJWAL.

The Right will eventually overcome this problem by setting up substitutes for all left-wing controlled media, including Reddit itself. We've already got gab.ai to replace twatter and Infogalactic to replace Wikipedia. Next, I hope, will be a Youtube replacement.

Let me start us off with 2 book gems and 2 important essays. Of course the whole point of this is to have a Red Pill Right discussion so the most important thing is /r/theredpill sidebar books and essays.

Books

1. The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith explains Capitalism.
   
   
2. Atlas Shrugged- no explanation should be needed. Ian Rand hits it out of the park.
   
   Essays
   
   
3. Dictatorships and Double Standards in which Reagan UN Secretary Jean Kirkpatrick identifies an "America First" foreign policy.
   
   
4. I Pencil: where Leonard Read explains just how complicated the market really is and how the Invisible Hand really does guide it. They can't fix the health care system. They can't even make a pencil.
   
   Also what about Milo's books?
   
   Forbidden Thoughts and SJW's Always lie

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4?ie=UTF8&ref_=dp_kinw_strp_1

Anyone read this book? This seems popular and probably written by a goblin. Honestly this is pseudo philosophy. Might as well just pick up "On Bullshit" to actually be a more critical thinker. This book smells like goblin piss.

>this book seems to have been written by an angry little boy that hates practically everyone simply because they don't hate everyone too. in his opinion, no one else should have an opinion unless you agree with him. if you want insight on what it must be like inside the twisted brain of a trump supporting xenophobic moron, this book is for you. if you listen to sarah palin and think she's not retarded, you'll love this book, but you may have to have your mom read it to you. if you're the sort of person that runs for president because god called you on the phone and told you to run, you'll appreciate this work. this book belongs on the shelf at the 700 club, your local kkk branch, and comes highly recommended by those westboro freaks.

Amazon reviews. Seems like the goblins had really came out FULL FORCE. Everybody we must mobilized or the battle of helms deep will come.

Here is the desktop version of your link

They've been friends since Gamergate.

Milo also wrote the foreword for SJWs Always Lie in 2015:

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Thought-Justice-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

Which was #1 Political Philosophy for a couple years off and on. Darn good book too.

Entryism. You can read about how they do this in this book. I'm not affiliated with the author.

In our defense, all SJWs are worthy of being cast into live volcanos--not just INFP SJWs. In fact--that's my newest crusade.

An INTJ-writ book, FWIW: https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

If you haven't yet, read SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. He goes over their tactics and mentality and what you can do to protect yourself. Really short book, <$10 ebook, and entertaining read. Highly suggest it.

Start your blog back up and read SJWs Always Lie, the manual on how to deal with SJW attacks.

I first heard the term "virtue signalling" on Vox Day's blog. I don't know if he originated it, but he did write a book about SJWs (and how to defeat them.)

If you truly want the full answer, buy https://www.amazon.com/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

I listened to it on my commute to work. Totally opened my eyes.

Wikipedia gives no citation for the heretic's ethnicity. His ethnicity is noted in the Foreward to this rudely named book.

https://www.amazon.com/Cuckservative-How-Conservatives-Betrayed-America-ebook/dp/B018ZHHA52

https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X

i read this in less than a day i think. pretty informative considering how concise it is.

A few places you might think of starting with:
Gary Gutting has some fairly accessible stuff on french philosophy.

Peter Singer has written books on Hegel and Marx that might be helpful.

Peter Singer's very short introduction on Hegel was a good starting when I had to read about Hegel.

Hegel's really a fan of protestantism....which will shortly become apparent to you. He's also really interested in the french revolution...so that might give you some ideas. If you have any specific questions I can probably help. I found Peter Singer's introduction to Hegel pretty helpful and concise. You can probably find a pdf floating around somewhere on the internet.

On Hegel in particular, I would recommend Hegel: A Very Short Introduction or the more scholarly An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History.

sorry! but i got amazon links :)
https://www.amazon.com/Think-Compelling-Introduction-Simon-Blackburn/dp/0192854259 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0815300557/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me= https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133457982/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me= https://www.amazon.com/Challenge-Dragons-Dove-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00ZGROCUQ https://www.amazon.com/Auditing-Based-Approach-Conducting-Quality-Audit/dp/1305080572

I'll let some of the other people on here direct you where to dig in and answer your questions more directly, but this was by far the most compelling introductory book for me: https://www.amazon.com/Think-Compelling-Introduction-Simon-Blackburn/dp/0192854259.

I can't recommend it enough to begin, and from there you can branch out with what you find enjoyable

There's a few issues with Peterson's approach to philosophy. The foremost is the extent to which he pretends to be an expert in philosophical issues without actually having well-defended philosophical positions. His pragmatism, for instance, wouldn't pass muster in a graduate class on pragmatism -- and University of Toronto has some leading pragmatist scholars that he could talk to about the subject. This is unfortunately typical of Peterson's approach. His original commentary on Bill C-16 was ignorant and ultimately misled the public. His commentary on dominance hierarchies is also speculative, outside his ken, and misleading.

So while it's great to make philosophy more public there's plenty better people to do it and plenty better ways to do it. Simon Blackburn is a great example of a well-regarded philosopher who offers informed, accurate, work to the public in an accessible way. Dan Dennett is also stand-out example of a great philosopher who does great professional and public work. Or, also from the University of Toronto, there's Joseph Heath, who is now one of Canada's foremost public intellectuals on political and economic subjects.

Contrast that with Peterson's extremely polarizing and error-prone approach. I'd be glad to have fewer Petersons and more Heaths or Nussbaums.

This is a really difficult question and people disagree, you could also ask the fine people over at r/asksocialscience. More philosophically, Michael Huemer has written a book on Ethical Intuitionism. My own thought is that if there need to be philosophical arguments for it, it cannot be said to exist innately, though social science may also return different answers from different studies. As I said, this is a difficult question that different people have different opinions on in the philosophy world.

Ah good. But you've got an MA, no? Whereas both mine are undergrad and in subjects I don't care about (study science, they said. Commit crimes against the lower mammals. Study law, they said. Hang out with lawyers. Become a lawyer, do paperwork. What a dumbass.)

Yeah, I've got R&P. I just ordered The Groundwork earlier tonight. I ordered Practical Ethics yesterday, actually as well, I thought that was supposed to be the Singer? I'll get the other two when I get paid.

Also have you read Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism? Someone told me it was the best defence of moral realism of recent times.

If you would like a broad overview of metaethical theory that presents the various viewpoints in a fairly simple to understand format, while also offering extra material covering more complex aspects, see Michael Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism. He does have a moral objectivist thesis in the book, but he covers all the various viewpoints very fairly, and he has a special talent for breaking complex arguments down into simple chunks. I think his argument is weakest against moral nihilism, but he demonstrates fairly conclusively that subjectivism is untenable.

> It is entirely permissible in logic to hold that something can neither be proven nor disproven, this is the entire reason that we come up with new axioms to add on to our old ones in mathematics.

It might be permissible in logic, but that doesn't mean that there aren't propositions that are either true or false.

> Assuming a strict dichotomy of truth -- and further extending that to provability -- is a fallacy.

I don't know about provability and how that's relevant here, but I don't think that assuming that a proposition like "I have two hands" is either true or false is a fallacy in any way. You might argue that the proposition is somehow not truth-apt, or that there's not a fact of the matter about how many hands I have, but that would be an extremely hard argument to make.

> While it appears that there can be no argument for hard determinism based within the author's definition of "rational discourse", that does not on its own serve as a proof that it is false.

Of course there can be. You deny one of the premises and then provide your own argument for hard determinism.

> The meat here is in the question of whether hard determinism is possibly true, not MFT specifically, but assuming that choices are possible in premise 1 already assumes that hard determinism is false. So the author gets away with technically not begging the question while also already assuming the entire meat of the argument in one of the premises.

He addresses this in Objection #1, especially BQ2 and the last two paragraphs.

> What we must be interested with primarily then is their argument for the first premise, since that's where the actual meat is hidden, and that appears to me to be merely a pragmatic argument, and thus not actually demonstrating proof of veracity.

He doesn't make any 'deep' arguments for P1, because the fact is that there are not many people who are willing to deny it. If he still doesn't "believe that there exist these different senses of 'should'" as he writes there, then I guess the first part of his defense of P1 is his whole 2007 book https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Intuitionism-Michael-Huemer/dp/0230573746 and the second part is so obvious that what he wrote in the free will paper should be enough.

I think you might still be under the wrong impression that this is supposed to be some kind of a mathematical proof, and that the premises must then be a priori true with 100% certainty, but that's not how philosophical arguments work. Typically, all you would need to accept a premise would be to believe that it's more likely true than false. And this doesn't make the argument "practical" in any way.

>Well, what's your argument for the "maybe not"? Where else would you propose moral intuitions come from?>

I personally wouldn't make any argument for it yet as I'm not informed enough to, but I plan to read a few books on the topic in the coming months. Have you ever checked out this article?


>we probably find a case where your emotional response/moral intuition can be shown to be a bad reference for value judgments. Or would you disagree?>

I wouldn't disagree. But again, I'd like to look a little more into the issue.


>I don't think that's a good thing, but it shows me how my moral intuitions/emotions/empathy doesn't reflect the reality of what's right and wrong because I know the pig is every bit as morally relevant as a dog.>

No, I think you're right actually. I'd probably get extra upset if I read that someone was abusing a white bulldog. And that makes sense, but not a lot of sense.



>Usually when people talk about ethics/morals they're talking about intentional choices to do some sort of good. This is a bit of a tangent, so probably no important. Just thought I'd mention that.>

I was kinda joking about the vultures and rats. I don't think they can be ethical like humans can be. That said, we're learning more about animal cognition all the time and I think we still have a lot more to learn. Have you ever read this article before? That and the other related SEP articles about animals are certainly worth checking out.



>Pulling the lever is what saves more people than simply leaving it, right?>

Right. A lot of people belittle this thought experiment but I think it's fun.

>So you'd argue that the conductor shouldn't save the several people on the tracks at the expense of the one fat guy or whatever?>

Right. And I think you phrased it right by saying shouldn't save. It boils down really to what one thinks about doing vs allowing harm. I think a consequentialist would say the difference between the two isn't morally relevant, right? If so, I understand where the consequentialist is coming from, but I might disagree. Again, I'm giving opinions about things like this when I shouldn't be, not having done my due diligence by reading more into ethics.

>Cute... In a hideous sort of way!>

That's the English Bulldog for ya. The English have a weird sense of humor.

>I haven't really thought about non-cognitivism specifically, but I have thought about moral anti-realism. It seems like non-cognitivism is a subset of that.>

There are some differences. The biggest being that moral anti-realism is a cognitivist metaethical theory and non-cognitivism theories like Emotovism are, obviously, non-cognitivist moral theories. I don't know if you require this, but I'll copy and paste something here for you:

>The cognitivist argues for two claims. The first is that when someone makes a moral claim they are expressing a belief. The second is that moral claims can be true or false; this is part of cognitivism because beliefs are the sort of thing that can be true or false. Philosophers call the potential for a claim to be true or false truth-aptness . Because beliefs are thought to be descriptions, cognitivism is sometimes called descriptivism.>

>Potential misunderstandings • Cognitivism is not the view that moral claims are true, since it is quite coherent for the cognitivist to hold that all moral claims are false (see Chapter 3 ). This is a common mistake and it is best avoided by remembering that cognitivism is a view about truth-aptness and not about truth.>

>Non-cognitivism The non-cognitivist argues that if a person makes a moral claim they are expressing a non-belief state such as an emotion: for example, to say that “killing is wrong” is to express disapproval towards killing. Put crudely, it is as if you are saying “Boo! Killing!” Consequently, because expressions of approval or disapproval are not the sort of things that can be true or false, the non-cognitivist thinks that moral claims are not truth-apt in the way that the cognitivist thinks moral claims are truth-apt.>

>Potential misunderstanding • Non-cognitivism is not the view that moral claims are about our own mental states. For example, it is not the claim that “killing is wrong” really means “I disapprove of killing”. In fact, this would be a form of cognitivism, which asserts that when we make a moral claim we are describing a mental state, in this case my disapproval of killing>

>Error theory in morality derives from three plausible views. The first is cognitivism, the view that moral judgements express beliefs and aim to describe some sector of reality and are consequently truth-apt. The second is non-realism , the view that there are no moral values that correspond to our moral beliefs. The third is that truth involves correspondence to facts. These three views lead to the radical conclusion that moral claims are systematically and uniformly false.>

>Moral error theory is a radical position. It is the view that all these statements are false : • Abducting and torturing children is morally wrong. • Providing famine relief to starving families is morally good. • Locking people in a church and throwing petrol bombs through the window is evil. • It is morally right to save the boy trapped in floodwaters. The error theorist would be quick to remind us that he is not saying that it is right to torture children, bad to give money to charity, wrong to save a boy trapped in floodwaters. For he argues that there is no moral truth at all.>

Moving on now.


>I think there is also factual evidence for morally relevant values. Those values being, as I mentioned before, positive and negative mental experiences.>

I think, but don't quote me on this, that another way of saying this is moral properties can be reduced to natural properties, and by "natural" philosophers mean the subject matter of the natural sciences, which include psychology.

Moral psychology would be an interesting project to look into.





>Here's a little thought experiment: Suppose we lived in a universe with no positive or negative mental experiences. So no suffering, no depriving another of happiness, no ability to be distressed or stressed. All mental experiences (if they existed) would be neutral. Could morality or ethics still exist? You couldn't hurt or help anyone. I'd take the position that it couldn't, there would be no morally relevant way to affect anything.>

I mean, I think that sounds certainly plausible.



>since we naturally will value our own positive/negative mental experiences, if we're being objective we couldn't discount another individual's positive/negative mental experiences. To be consistent, we'd have to value them similarly to our own. To place value on our mental experiences and discount another's, even though the experiences are comparable would be irrational. I don't think that helps with the "should", it just works with a motivation that already exists. There's no traction on people that aren't committed to being rational in the ways I described.>

Right. The only thing to my mind at this point is to say -- one ought to be rational. But I couldn't give you a decisive reason right now why we ought to be rational. As Walt Whitman said defiantly, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." He practically made a (rather benign) ethos out of that statement.

Actually successful peaceful, non-violent protest surpassed violent protest during the 1950s.

>Success Rate: Violence 1990s ~22%, 2000s ~12%; Non-Violence 1990s ~51%, 2000s ~66%

Erica Chenoweth proves this point within her book Why Civil Resistance Works which uses a quantitative model (p<.05, n>140) to state that,

>"nonviolent campaigns facilitate the active participation of many more people than violent campaigns, thereby broadening the base of resistance and raising the costs to opponents of maintaining the status quo."

Just because a person is born in poverty within the United States does not mean they have to be in poverty for the rest of their lives. Likewise, a country born in violence can turn away from violence to work for peaceful turns. Such is the case of the United States.

As for your, "get done without necessary violence," Chenoweth finds that violence actually hurts the users' causes. Most violent actions causes backfiring from their opposition.

You should read her book or at least listen to one of her Online Discussions.

Read one fucking book you illiterate numbnuts: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839

A good place to start might be Why Civil Resistance Works. The writers touch on a number of points, but the most relevant to your question is this: looking at a number of movements that aim to effect social change, they find that non-violent movements often achieve greater results. They theorize that by eschewing violence, they open the doors to greater participation and attract a wider variety of 'recruits' than a similarly-minded but violent group might.

So, land of the free really doesn't look so free these days. I've worked alongside more professional police in the Congo and Lebanon, but America, your country seems to get more terrifying for the law abiding citizen everyday.

What percentage of your population do you expect to be abused, assaulted and violated by unprofessional, trigger-happy, power-hungry-tripping "policemen" (and yes, I use quotations, because they are really thugs with guns who persistently fail to follow your country's legal framework and clearly show no regard for violating your ever preached about Constitution, which supposedly makes the USA the "greatest country" on Earth) before mass citizens will march on Congress?

I ask this as someone who genuinely cares for the common man, woman, and child. But, I cannot understand how you can have such a strong Occupy movement against the banks, yet when it comes to your civil liberties and personal rights, there appears to be no form of mass response other than rioting (which isn't the answer either).

There's a REALLY great book on civil resistance which I and many of my fellow journalist friends would strongly recommend you read, and consider applying. Check it out from your library and I promise, you'll feel drastically more informed over how effectively individual communities, towns and cities can stand up to abusive authorities and successfully alter the outcome in their favour.

I hope at least some of you pick this book up, and pass it along to your concerned friends.

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0231156839/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1522596259&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=why+civil+resistance+works&dpPl=1&dpID=41BhSdDV3kL&ref=plSrch

>Their conversion just proves that despite the gift of intelligence, one is nevertheless susceptible to irrational beliefs.

How is it irrational when these people gave rational reasons for their belief in the truth of the Christian religion? Check out any of their books/writings. Are Edward Feser's The Last Supersition and 5 Proofs irrational? What about Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy? What about Alaisdair Macintyre's After Virtue?

>You said he wasn't a Christian yet. Did he accept Jesus as his savior? That is the requirement for salvation from what I know.

Looks like your only idea of Christianity is Protestant Christianity (in fairness to Protestant denominations though, many of them are nuanced in their views on this issue and would disagree with the assertion that only Christians are saved). The Catholic Church which was founded by Christ himself disagrees, and so do the other apostolic orthodox churches (Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox).

>What other ways would this be?

I quoted official teaching, didn't you read it?

>You know this how?

Because they themselves shared their reasons for converting/believing in the truth of Christianity (for non-converts) in their talks, books and writings? How else dude?

>What's this evidence that others converted over?

A lot -- philosophical, scientific and historical evidence.

Philosophical: The traditional cosmological arguments (given by the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition -- Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Leibiniz, etc) for the God of classical theism, the argument from consciousness, the moral argument and others.

Science: The Kalam Cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from biological teleology, and the argument from the laws of nature.

History: the argument from Jesus' miracles, the historical case for the Resurrection, Catholic miracles, and the religious experiences and mystical gifts of countless Christian saints. I lay this out these arguments briefly in this post.

>Because of this outright lie and string of labels thrown at me:

Nah, my assessment is self evident from what you wrote. A silly absolute statement like "no Christian ever believed in his faith on the basis of reason and evidence" is extremely telling...especially given that you doubled down on your erroneous views after being given abundantly clear evidence.

>You espouse nothing but poor reasoning

You can't espouse poor reasoning. You can however espouse an idea supported by poor reasoning. Assuming this is what you meant, I still haven't done it. You have no examples for how my arguments rely on poor reasoning, you just keep insisting that they do. This is due to your own reliance on specious reasoning.

>You're an apologist. You've chosen that position and it's an ugly one.

Sigh.... You know what an apologist is right? Lets use the term in a sentence... "The christian apologists tried to defend their beliefs using reason, thinking that belief in god could be found through logic." Hmm... Maybe a definition would still be useful.

Ya... I'm not an apologist. I'm not arguing in defense of a belief. I'm arguing against a belief in moral realism. You, my friend, function as the apologist in this debate. Please stop using words without knowing how to use them.

>My morals are quite measured and I do not follow them blindly, with faith. I quoted this because this is all you do. You make stupid and baseless attacks because you have no defense.

Watch this: "My belief in God is quite measured and I do not follow him blindly, with faith." Just because you use reason to justify things after the fact does not make the original assumption true, or any less "faithful."

You seem to have a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to moral theory and what is possible through moral theory. Sam Harris, while an interesting individual, and right about many things, is fundamentally wrong when it comes to what science can do with regard to morals. Not in the sense that his moral system is untenable, but rather in the sense that you can't get his moral system strictly through scientific study—which he claims we can. Assumptions must be made before you can even begin the study of well-being and suffering, and even more must be made in order to say that you should promote one and avoid the other.

A person's insistence on the existence of universal objective morals is best termed as a FAITH. There is no evidence of universal objective morals, and they are fundamentally unscientific entities in the same sense God is—even if we wanted to, we could never find evidence of them. At best they are commonly assumed entities—like God is for most people.

And I repeat, because you seem to think I am some sort of moral heathen, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT MORALS ARE USELESS OR THAT WE SHOULD LET PEOPLE DO WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE THERE ARE NO OBJECTIVE MORALS. Your feelings about me being somehow deficient are the same feelings a religious fundamentalist would have toward both of us due to our lack of belief.

That you think a bit of pop-science is somehow "important" for me to read is laughable. If what you know of morals comes from that book, I feel sorry for you. I understand that many atheists will praise anything that comes from the "canon" writers on atheism like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, however, being a fan of someone does not make all of their work good, or even relevant. At best, Sam Harris is simply endorsing the naturalistic fallacy. At worst, he's willfully ignorant of what the naturalistic fallacy is, and simply wishes to push his view as a "counterpoint" to religious morality.

Since you so kindly left me a link to a book, allow me to do the same, by linking you to the most important books in moral theory for you to read, some of which argue directly against me, but at this point the idea is to get you educated, not to get you to agree with me:

Alisdair MacIntyre — After Virtue

Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche — The Genealogy of Morals

Kant — Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics

G.E. Moore — Principia Ethica

I've done my best to find the best editions of these books available (I myself usually default to the Cambridge editions of works in the history of philosophy). You may also want to check out some Peter Singer, along with Bentham and Mill, if only to know what it means to be a utilitarian. After that, read John Rawls, because he'll tell you one reason why utilitarianism is so controversial in ethical theory.

I hope to hear back from you about the results of your studies. I figure you can easily find pdfs of these books (though perhaps not the same editions I linked) somewhere online. Given about a month or two to read them all (I'm not sure how much free time you have... maybe more like three months) you should be up to speed. Hopefully I'll hear back from you after the new year. At that point, I don't expect you to agree with my view on ethics, but I at least expect you will understand it, and be able to argue your own position somewhat more effectively than you are at the moment. If nothing else, think of this as a way to learn how to "stick it" to people like me.

Maybe by then you'll have gotten beyond the whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" disposition you seem to have when confronted with someone who's better than you at debating ethics. I can only hope.

If you take ethics seriously at all, do this for yourself: study the shit out of ethical theory.

>I have not yet encountered this problem.

You mentioned computers before so I'll use them here as an example:

My computer, in front of me now, is meaningful in that it is meaningful to me. It's meaningful to you, too, in an abstract way because I'm using it to transmit this message. It allows me to access stores of information I could never have dreamed of.

Now, imagine a nuclear apocalypse. 95% of the world's human population dies. Most knowledge of the post-industrial and indeed industrial world is lost to history.

I live near DC so odds are my area will be pretty radioactive; it'll be hundreds of years, if not more, before the area is habitable and longer still before it is excavated.

Imagine, then, that the descendants of the survivors of this apocalypse, generations later, find my poor laptop. It will have no meaning for them, because they have no use for it. Similarly, were I to go back in time to, say, 1500, my computer would have no meaning for the people of that time, because they have no use for it.

My computer has meaning in that it has meaning to its user. Purely extrinsic value, there. Humans, however, we possess something innate. No one knows really what to call it - some say it's a soul, some would say it's consciousness, some would call it free will - whatever it is, we don't understand it at all. But we pretty much all agree that a human has innate value, period.

So, to say that I am to God like my computer is to me is demeaning to that innate whatever-it-is, don't you think?

NOTE: the above is a restructuring of a thought experiment presented in the introduction to Alaisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue which, if you haven't already, is a dense but phenomenal work and totally worth the effort.

>I see no problem with that.

Me either :)

>Can you come up with something that would?

I didn't today - ain't life fun like that? I don't think you need one meaning, all the time, forever. Meaning can change as we do. I'm not the same as I was before I met you, or before I turned 25, or before I turned 16, etc. You're not the same, either. Why should your "meaning" be so permanent when "you" are not?

>Why must it? Without God it seems that we are just chemical bonds.

I agree with you, it seems like we're chemical bonds. But I'm not a monist - there's something else there. We don't understand consciousness, not even a little bit. We don't know where it comes from, what it is, whether my dog is conscious in the same way I am and if not, then whether she is conscious at all. We just don't know.

On a personal level I still haven't decided whether the field of Noetics is doing really, really interesting scientific work or really, really interesting voodoo, but suffice to say it's really, really interesting (to me, at least). Check it out if you get a sec!

But what I said was, given that human life does have meaning and given that there is no God, then the meaning of human life cannot come from God, and must come from human life.

>I don't plan to continue this thread much further - this isn't a terribly good time or place to summarise a first year moral philosophy textbook for you, nor would doing so benefit you in the same way that reading that textbook and thinking about it would.

Weird you should drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode, because we're actually agreeing vehemently on everything of substance.

>There is no "moral reality" in the way that there are atoms or energy levels or other physical things.

Not quite. We haven't found one when we've investigated. It's worth remembering that even at the time of the Enlightenment, the field of moral philosophy started with a mixture of divine command and natural-law as its "informed priors" (the frame for its questions). Darwinian evolution dealt a major blow to natural-law/natural-teleology theories, as well.

The finding that we cannot locate an "atom of morality" or a universal optimization target (at least, one that fits our moral intuitions better than the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a posteriori. Unfortunately, some people drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode and insist that their moral intuitions have so much epistemic value that naturalism must be completely wrong.

And these people have tenure!

>Yet almost everyone lives by some kind of moral code,

Well yes, of course.

>and almost everyone thinks something rather nice has happened over the last few hundred years as we drove back ignorance, racism, sexism, slavery, oppression and so forth.

With emphasis on the almost. There are still serious moral philosophers who may like modernity, but take positions that are technically opposed to it.

>Arguably civilisation couldn't work at all unless most people most of the time followed moral rules, or if it could work there would be massive overheads in policing everyone.

It also requires massive policing overheads when you try to run it very, shall we say, wickedly. It shouldn't be too unsupported to assert that nice rulers require more police than mean rulers.

>So how do we justify moral beliefs in a universe that hasn't been so kind as to give us an atom of evil or a wavelength of sin or anything similar? Well, if you want the long version then study moral philosophy. The very short version is we just make something up, or we do something reasonably sophisticated with game theory to get to a very similar place assuming self-interested agents capable of big picture thinking.

Yes, this is exactly what I said. We can take an anti-realist stance ("make something up"), or we can take a very sophisticated, reforming sort of realist stance that involves precise naturalistic grounding (game theory and psychology are aspects of nature too, you know).

But in either case, the Is/Ought Gap, or Moore's Open Question Argument in its other form, are simply not Hard Problems in the sense of demonstrating that the gap is impossible to bridge. In the a-posteriori absence of mystical moral particles, morality is left amenable to natural, empirical investigation via very precise theories of which empirical facts count as moral facts (or via outright anti-realism, which denies that there exists any gap between normative ethics and moral psychology, and thus denies the normativity of ethics in general). The problem is that some trained, professional academic philosophers remain actually committed to the position that the strength of their realist intuitions constitutes evidence against naturalism, or attempt to rationalize ways in which naturalism self-undermines.

Check out Harry Gensler's Introduction to Logic. He is a really good writer - and everything is very clear.

> I told you I believe in an objective morality.

So you say.

> In your mind does the First Amendment consist of special
> exceptions provided for a group of offensive talkers?
> Protections for gun owners apply to everyone, the fact that you
> don't own a gun doesn't make you not protected for the same
> reason that you not saying things that are offensive doesn't mean
> that the first amendment doesn't apply to you.

See this is the problem, you think we are talking about the constitution.

This is about a bill that will hopefully prevent the extinction of elephants. But only if people can keep their eye on the ball. Only if every little special interest group doesn't get to put in their little ammendment to make it "better".

> Prove right now objectively that the golden rule is true.

Here's an introductory text book on logic which contains a proof of the golden rule. I'm sure this is better than anything I could come up with:
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Logic-Harry-J-Gensler/dp/0415996511

> I can easily prove that it is faulty and subjective. I like to be cut, therefore I can cut other people.

How smart you are. Its difficult to believe that so many people over so many years of human history couldn't come up with your simple yet irrefutable proof.

> Name some regulations that have been removed due to being ineffective.

The prohibition act of 1919 comes to mind.

>> Surely the people that have written this bill have spent more time thinking about what might work than the NRA minions of reddit

> Why would you assume this? Because you agree with it?

No, because it makes more sense that bill takes longer to write than it does to write a reddit response. Although this thread may yet prove me wrong.

> Your idea of injustice is just what everyone else calls LIFE.

how cute

>Taxes pay for military bases and hardware. By your rationale, I should either be able to take the nearest nuclear sub out for a ride or I should get money for not being able to do that.

not for riding but you ought to be able to opt out of something like a nuclear weapon program. this is called direct democracy and it has been proven to work.

>The reason you shouldn't continue is not because I'm picking words. You shouldn't continue because you have a horseshit argument that you clearly cannot back up

i have backed up all my arguments.

you on the other hand is not making much sense

I suggest you read this book

>http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Logic-Harry-J-Gensler/dp/0415996511/

It depends. But I'm glad you asked, for the following suggestions might also be helpful to others.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to think that pointing out fallacies is an efficient way to "fight the good fight". At least, that's my impression. Please correct me when I'm wrong.

Unfortunately, almost all the evidence points to a different direction: It's usually not very effective, because those committing the fallacy usually don't care much about a logical analysis of the situation, anyway. This does also apply to non-believers. Assuming all humans process information in two ways (see Kahneman's System 1 and 2), even atheists often seem to ignore their own system 2, because it actually takes effort to use it.

However, if you're looking for resources about fallacies, any good book on logic will help. One of the best one, I've been told, is "Introduction to logic" by Gensler. You may only need the first 5 chapters, because it becomes quite technical after that. Maybe, Amazon can help find a less technical book.

If, however, you're looking to persuade people, that's a completely different story.

Here, a very common recommendation is Cialdini's "Influence". You can research its contents easily online, so there's no need to buy it. Cialdini emphasizes six common areas to get people to agree with you.

I've looked at your comment history, so here's a short overview what you may want to change to be more effective:

• Liking: People say yes to people they like. Being offensive to believers is thus unlikely to help you make your point.
  
• Scarcity: People often want they don't think is hard to get. It's thus okay to say that we as atheists may indeed by the exception. It might help to say, you understand if your opponent is unable to understand your position.
  
• Authority: It helps to have bookmarks, or notes, from authorities who believers respect (typically other believers).
  
• Social Proof: It helps to have notes and bookmarks about being a non-believer is on the rise, generally speaking.
  
• Reciprocity: People tend to return a favor. This is hard to apply online, but it may help offline.
  
• Commitment: If people commit, verbally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment. It's thus worth trying to get your opponents to agree to a certain set of principles. For instance, the fight about gay marriage was won by appealing to one of the most common principles among Americans: Freedom. A simple change of words (from the "right to marry" to the "freedom to marry") made a big difference.
  
  Hope this helps.

Get a basic background in logic and statistics and their respective fallacies. This will give you the knowledge and tools you need to think critically of 99% of what you find in news media and websites. A good introduction to logic is Harry Gensler's Introduction to Logic textbook. A good guide to statistical fallacies and how to spot them is [The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb] (http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable-ebook/dp/B00139XTG4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1421288487&sr=1-1&keywords=the+black+swan+taleb).

>Your rule says that the exception shouldn't happen, period. If it does, then the rule needs heavy revision.
Ron Paul hired Amway spokesperson and author Doug Wead to serve as senior campaign adviser for $8,000 a month. Wead continues to run similar schemes to this very day with other members of Ron Paul's family, and Rand Paul himself recently hired Doug Wead as senior adviser as well.

No it doesn't. I don't subscribe to a philosophy that advocates for a utopian society. You throw up straw men like nothing I've ever seen before. Also, why are you so obsessed with Amway?

>Irrelevant. People are also voluntary voting for Donald Trump, in far higher number than they are for Rand.

Not irrelevant. You said that people can become billionaires by selling a product that 99% of people think is bullshit. Which is still completely false and you've yet to back up that claim. Also, Donald Trump has nothing to do with this argument. Please focus on defending the claim that a billionaire can make a product that 99% of people think are bullshit and still be a billionaire.

>Bernie Madoff.

He's serving 150 years in a federal prison. Let's keep it to billionaires that played within the law because in a free market economy he would still be rotting in prison.

>Estimated minimum wage effects on employment from a meta-study of 64 studies showed insignificant employment effect (both practically and statistically) from the minimum-wage raises supporting the Keynesian model. The most precise estimates were heavily clustered at or near zero employment effects (elasticity = 0).
47% of respected economics professors agree with the following statement, vs. only 14% who disagree: "The distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy."
Mind you, 14% is the number of professors who claim that the costs outweigh the benefits. The number of professors who claim zero benefits in the first place is going to be far less than that.
And before you claim bias: This economic survey was conducted by the Chicago school, which is the most libertarian branch of economics out of the ones that use actual math.

I said the minimum wage causes unemployment, which you "disproved" in your first wikipedia article (with studies that showed absolutely no details regarding how the study was done) then you sent me the second article that has the majority of economists saying the exact opposite of what you first posted. The one's who disagree seem to be focusing on the word "noticeably" because a 9$ increase in minimum wage (as opposed to $7.25, now) would cause subtle increases in unemployment.

Regarding the "benefits of raising minimum wage" article. I never made a claim that it provided no benefits and I never made a claim about a $9 an hour minimum wage. All throughout history there have been slight increases in the minimum wage with fairly unnoticeable distortionary effects, but there are distortionary effects none the less including an increase in unemployment which you proved in your second article.

Again, more straw men.

>My argument is that you can be a billionaire even if 99% of the population thinks your product is bull shit. I've presented examples of this happening.

No you've said "amway" over, and over, and over again. Evil, Capitalist Amway provides over 21,000 people with decent enough paying jobs and sells nutritional supplements and different types of personal health care products. They don't "steal" money. Bernie Madoff is sitting in prison right now. Keep trying.

>I'm citing actual data and empirical examples. Meanwhile, you're claiming something that less than 14% of economics professors believe as a universal truth in economics circles, and you want to accuse me of living in an echo chamber.

I made no such claim. I made a claim that the minimum wage increases unemployment, which as you proved with your second article that it does.

Please stay on topic.

Also, read this when you get the chance and maybe we can keep this discussion from drifting off into 90 different directions with straw men whenever you can't prove a point you made.

CGP Grey mentions the teleport thought experiment in this episode.

If you enjoy those sort of discussions I very highly recommend the pig that wants to be eaten

A fantastic collection of similar thought provoking excerpts from novels. You might recognize the title from the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

I used to be "pro-life" but recently flipped because of something I read. I will transcribe it here and see what you think:

>Dick had made a mistake, but surely the price he was paying was too high. He of course knew that level six of the hospital was a restricted area. But after he had drunk one too many glasses of wine with his colleagues at the finance department Christmas party, he had inadvertently staggered out of the elevator on the sixth floor and passed out on one of the empty beds.

> When he woke up he discovered to his horror that he had been mistaken for a volunteer in a new life-saving procedure. Patients who required vital organ transplants to survive were being hooked up to volunteers, whose own vital organs kept both alive. This would continue until a donor organ could be found, which was usually around nine months later.

> Dick quickly called over a nurse to explain the mistake, who in turn brought over a worried-looking doctor.

>"I understand your anger," explained the doctor, "but you did behave irresponsibly, and now you are in this position, the brutal truth is that if we disconnect you, the world-renowned violinist who depends on you will die. You would in fact be murdering him."

> "But you have no right!" protested Dick. "Evenif he dies without me, how can you force me to give up nine months of my life to save him."

> "I think the question you should be asking," said the doctor sternly, "is how you could choose to end this violinists life."

• Julian Baggini, The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, (Credit is given to "A defense of abortion," by Judith Jarvis Thompson
  
  
  Firstly, you have to understand that when I read this, I didn't realize I was approaching the issue of abortion, which makes me feel that I was less biased and more honest in my assessment of this scenario. You are "primed" so to speak because you understand that this scenario it supposed to make a point about abortion. All I ask is that you try your best to be as honest with yourself as possible.
  
  When I read the scenario, I felt that is was pretty open and closed. Even if your own personal morals tell you that, if you were in Dick's position then you should stay connected to the "violinist," they still have no right, in my opinion, to force him to stay connected.
  
  The scenario also allows for a lot of things that are normally taken for granted in arguments about abortion. For instance, Dick is unarguably connected to another, clearly sentient human being. In fact, the human being he is connected to has memories and experiences, things we cannot attribute to a fetus. Also, in the scenario, Dick ended up in the situation through an irresponsible act of his own.
  
  Despite all of these things, I still feel that Dick should not be forced to stay connected to this other person against his will.
  
  It took me a couple weeks, but I eventually had to admit that I see no relevant difference between this scenario and abortion and therefore, in order for me to remain consistent, I either had to change my stance on libertarianism (which would change my position on a huge amount of other issues), or assume a libertarian position on abortion. I chose the latter and I am now pro-choice.

I could offer you a reading list to elucidate my points about Russia and the negatives of imperialism within burgeoning industrialist society. Right now however, I'm actually very stretched thin. I'm on a business trip that looks like will now be extended. I'm working just under 100 hours per week now that I've inherited two more projects that were supposed to be assigned to others. It's kind of a cop-out to not further expand on my earlier statements. But since I don't perceive you as being particularly close-minded (if anything you seem appropriately honest about what you do and do not know) it might actually be beneficial to simply provide you with the data as it was presented to me, and then let you draw your own conclusions.

For starters I'd recommend reading about the history:

http://www.amazon.com/Russia-Russians-History-Geoffrey-Hosking/dp/0674011147

This book gives a very wide-angle approach to Russia, Russians, and their governments.

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Forever-Until-More-Formation/dp/0691121176/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_c

This book offers a bit more of an intimate perspective about perhaps the most relevant generation of Post-Soviet influence.

http://www.amazon.com/Blowback-Second-Consequences-American-Empire/dp/0805075593

This book offers some insight into America's foreign policy during the 20th century. In particular the negative impact of crafting foreign policy through an aggressive campaign of global occupation. The latter chapters talk about China and the former Soviet Union and draws many disturbing parallels with the United States defense spending habits in the last decade.

http://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States-1492-Present/dp/B004HZ6XWS/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300861749&sr=1-2

This book will perhaps be the most controversial read out of the list. It deals with the very unfortunate relationship between corporatism and American politics as well as the various stages of civil rights and labor movements. There is also a great deal of additional facts about imperialism in America which expands many of the points made by Chalmers Johnson.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Means-Libertarian-Charles-Murray/dp/0767900391/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300861920&sr=1-1

There are several areas of agreement in this book between the views expressed by Chalmers Johnson and Howard Zinn. While the principles certainly come from different places, there is a well-reasoned, and thoughtful common ground. It is challenging from any perspective to completely agree or disagree with these narratives, but the contrast is most refreshing.

http://www.amazon.com/Pig-That-Wants-Eaten-Experiments/dp/0452287448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300862132&sr=1-1

This book is basically a breath mint. The subjects being tackled in the rest of these books can often be somewhat troubling. This book will offer you short thought experiments that will prove entertaining as well as provocative. They will also help provide some lightheartedness to the mix.

The pig that wants to be eaten (collection of philosophical thought experiments with short commentary, i dont think its useful for someone with 0 background in philosophy except maybe as a taster but the more experienced people will see what they know and appreciate it).

[Contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion] (http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Debates-Philosophy-Religion-Peterson/dp/0631200436) (looks at arguments from both sides which im sure us agnostics looking for the truth will appreciate)

Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions

And for some (thought provoking) philosophical humour:

Antitheism - A reflection (essentially they turned the problem of evil on its head, they said all the good in the world disproves an all evil God in humour)

*Pascals Mugging

Hey me too :) But Biochem. Which UC (if you don't mind my asking)?

Let's see, what to read... How about this? Or personally I recommend The Mind's I by Dennet and Hofstadter or Godel, Escher and Bach by Hofstadter. They are really good philosophy/science/intelligence books, and are largely well-formed and thoughtful arguments on various philosophical questions.

Like this?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Pig-That-Wants-Eaten/dp/0452287448

My usual "recipe" for conversations is:

1. start with observational humor on environmental banalities (weather, pop culture, interesting buildings/statues, recent festivals, etc.) and explore basic biographical details (where are you from, have you lived here long, etc.)
   
   
2. eventually pivot to FORD (family, occupation, recreation, dreams), which can easily fill a few dozen hours
   
   2.5) actively listen to your conversation partner in addition to thinking about what to say next, e.g. split your attentions 65/25, respectively. Ask them questions about the stories they tell, but if your question is too much of a digression keep it in mind for later (earlier you mentioned X, I think Y, what do you think of Z?)
   
   2.75) have a bunch of relevant stories of your own in your back pocket that you can retrieve at a moment's notice, but beware one-upmanship; instead, seek to find or build common ground. Helpful to have explored lots of hobbies yourself here
   
   
3. you mentioned grad school -- people usually study stuff they're interested in, so dredge up relevant memories of old articles you've read and questions you had while reading them, and have them clarify tricky concepts for you. If you're not quite right it's just all the more opportunity for them to swoop in and show off, and at least signals your interest in whatever subject they're studying
   
   
4. another poster mentioned lists of questions -- I actually think these can be useful conversational aids! But don't, like, memorize the questions and completely break the flow of conversation asking one. Maybe during a quiet moment when all prior conversation threads have terminated you can pop in with a random "what's your favorite dinosaur" (and why?), but otherwise I've found these best for e.g. long drives together. Also, the linked questions maybe aren't the best -- I'd recommend getting one of these (personal faves have been Greg Stock's books, and I think I've tried most at this point; something like this also works). Each question has usually afforded around half an hour of conversation, though some took us a few hours and some a few minutes. Also, these are great for building a relationship off an existing foundation, which is to say that I've only ever tried the books of questions thing after I'd already talked to the person “organically” for 50-100 hours. But collectively they've probably given me many hundreds, if not thousands of hours of conversation, so I wouldn't be so quick to discount them!
   
   
5. bring it back to local entertainment -- listen to a podcast or audiobook together or watch a movie or documentary and pause to discuss points

>And I think my next pick up will be something by Benatar.

I guess you'll enjoy this.

No I am not using it wrong. Behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex. Prejudice or discrimination based on sex.

If two men had made the statements they wanted to win for men all over the country to prove a point wouldn't that be a sexist statement to make? Two women who are friends who say they are racing to see the world and have wonderful adventures together and hey, maybe win a million dollars doing it, shouldn't so difficult to say. When you have to make it a point that you are racing for women to prove a point then you are sexist.

You are no different than the girls on Survivor that huddle together and say "we need to stick together as women and get rid of the men so a woman wins". You are no different than minorities grouping together and saying they need to get rid of white people so a minority wins.

Racing on AR should not be about proving points to the world. It should be about proving something to yourself and having amazing experiences.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512

https://lithub.com/mia-the-liberal-men-we-love/

Outside of regular feminist literature (feminists usually acknowledge that the patriarchy is bad for men in various ways) I think David Benatar has a new book that might have some relevant stuff, though I haven't read it myself. Edit: here it is - http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against/dp/0470674512

Or you know science.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765552031/The-war-on-boys-young-men-are-facing-a-new-crisis.html?pg=all

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against-boys/304659/

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/05/the-war-against-boys/304659/

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/02/discrimination-against-boys-in-education-and-elsewhere/

http://www.cornwallcommunitynews.co.uk/2014/05/05/female-teachers-marking-down-boys/

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512

https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/eliminating-feminist-teacher-bias-erases-boys-falling-grades-study-finds

http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/students-can-detect-teachers-gender-bias-boys-suffer-most/

You are right about one thing it is a bad plot line from a dystopian film that would never ever get made by Hollywood.

From cradle to grave men are systematically discriminated against because like it or not Hillary was right.

We are hardwired to prefer girls, to favor girls, to treat them like children, and to view boys as expendable.

You are caught in a false reality bubble.

You might check out The Second Sexism, by David Benatar. He has expanded the arguments into a forthcoming book too.

I didn't know Pat had a scholar brother.

/s

Here's the full link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against/dp/0470674512 - for those of us that hate the mobile version.

I chose the title to the second sexism https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against-Boys/dp/0470674512.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Against/dp/0470674512

This is good theological justification of the type of ideas that Peter Singer has written about. I'm about half-way through right now, and I gotta say... I'm almost a vegitarian...almost.

> Where can i learn about ethics?

Reading about different ethical philosophies online. Reading books on ethics. Even getting involved in discussions here, /r/askphilosophy, /r/philosophy, /r/smartgiving, etc.

Practical Ethics is the book that has had the biggest impact on the way I reason about ethics. Before that, whereas I saw that reason could help us identify contradictions in our ethical views, I didn't see how any particular ethical philosophy had a solid ground to build its conclusions from beyond coming "from the heart" as you said. This book was the one that gave me hope that we can do better than mostly guessing when picking our starting point.

However, I'm still an ethics noob and there's a lot more for me to read before I can have a very substantiated opinion on what is best.

> How do you KNOW what is right or wrong?

I doubt we can know with 100% certainty. We can't empirically test our meta-ethical beliefs, but we can still apply reason to it, like we do with many other aspects of our life to try to work out the truth.

> Does it really just come "from your heart"?

I assume by this you mean from our intuitions or subconscious? I think that's where most ethical decisions are made from, but it probably shouldn't be entirely from there. The more we learn in general, the more we realize that our intuitions provide rules-of-thumb at best, but can often be wrong. For instance, it seems unintuitive to me that planes can fly, or massive ships can float. So if I really want to know the truth about the world, I don't think I should rely only on my intuitions. Plus, thought experiments like the trolley dilemma show that our ethical intuitions can be contradictory.

> Do you carry the same beliefs that your parents have implanted?

No, but I would expect this to be a major factor, just as it is for people's beliefs about anything.

> Have you learned from an institution of higher education?

No.

Sounds like a decent start. If you haven't already read Peter Singer's Practical Ethics, I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy. Based on the road you've set for yourself, I think you would really, really like to hear the philosophy of a guy who's spent his entire life thinking about this.

Short Intro to Hegel by Peter Singer
http://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Short-Introduction-Peter-Singer/dp/019280197X

I know you don't want any Huemer facts...but I thought it was cool that Stuart Rachels wrote a back cover review for Michael Huemer's book on Ethical Intuitionism.

I had that Elements too, though unfortunately I'm in the same boat as you so no recommendations. Just...please don't dogmatically adopt ethical theory that leads you to the conclusions you want to be true, m'kay? (cough Ethics of Liberty)

[And there just so happens to be a well research book on this very topic.] (http://www.amazon.com/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839)

Sure, an insurgency movement can be pretty effective at thwarting the attempts of an invading army. However, they don't have a great track record, when compared with mass non-violent movements, for bringing about any sort of society that most of us want to live in.

Edit: To clarify my point, I don't think it is a very accurate to compare insurgency movements to the reason that many people in the US cite for the reason to have their firearms; the ability to stop the government from becoming more authoritarian. There is a lot of academic literature on insurgencies, social movements and revolutions. Having read a lot of the literature on social movements and revolutions, I can't remember a single peer reviewed article or book that can show that access to firearms is a particularly important variable in the success of a revolution or social movement. If someone can point me to that literature, I would be happy to read it.

Here let me show you how a conversation works.

Person 1: This is that way

Person 2: No, this appears to be that way, but you're very statement contradicted what you said in the first place:

Person 1: Okay I'll show you why it's not a contradiction (OR) hmm maybe I was wrong.

You stated that Iran is an Islamic state that implements Sharia.

You said "Iran has executed women for attacking their rapist why can't you admit that Islam if not encourages but influences these actions"

I said: This can't be true, because the woman would not be able to attack her rapist if the Sharia was implemented, because the rapist would already be dead!

At this point you either: admit that Iran isn't practicing the Sharia properly, or you point to evidence that the rapist was put to death and thus never assaulted.

You're just jumping from topic to topic. How do you expect a conversation to ever end then?

https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Logic-Harry-J-Gensler/dp/0415996511

It doesn't and I didn't. I would recommend you to read this.

Prob either Gulag Archipelago or Explaining Post-Modernism.

Both of which are often recommended by Peterson. The former for its devastating explication of the dark inevitabilities of marxism, and the latter for its clear overview of post-modernism and how it has emerged and gained power through the decades.

1. Obviously not everything, but a lot of popular programming certainly adheres to those ideas and what not.
   
   
2. No, when did I say 'anyone slightly left of center'? You've just made that up yourself. The people I am talking about are almost entirely FAR leftists, so it's very much an extreme fringe -- albeit one that's very influential. I am right of center but know plenty of people who are left of center who mostly agree with me and find this stuff abhorrent, so you're just wrong about that.
   
   Also, none of this is my fabrication. There's a whole realm of analysis about it. Here's a great starting point for you: https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406

https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406

Another fair point. So, a clip here, so you don't even need to leave Reddit.

>...

>#Our Argument in Brief

>To orient readers, let me summarize the claims we defend in our book.

>Marriage is a human good with its own structure, like knowledge or friendship. The present debate is not a debate about whom to let marry, but about what marriage (the human good that the law has reasons to track) really is. Two answers compete for legal enshrinement.

>The first, driving the push for same-sex marriage, is that a certain emotional intimacy makes a marriage. But as our book shows, this answer can’t coherently distinguish marriage from companionship, an obviously broader category. So it gets marriage (the human good) wrong.

>The second view of marriage begins from basics. Any voluntary form of community involves common action; it unites people toward common ends in the context of commitment. And in these respects, what sets marital community apart is its comprehensiveness: in (1) how it unites people, (2) what it unites them with respect to, and (3) how extensive a commitment it demands.

>First, marriage unites people in their bodies as well as their minds. Just as your organs are one body by coordinating for the biological good of the whole (your survival), so a man and woman’s bodies unite by coordination (in sexual intercourse) for a biological good (reproduction) of the couple as a whole. No other activity makes of two people “one flesh.”

>Second, as the act that makes marital love also makes new life, so marriage itself is uniquely enriched and extended by the bearing and rearing of children, and the wide sharing of family life.

>Third, because of its comprehensiveness in both these senses, marriage alone requires comprehensive (permanent and exclusive) commitment, whatever the partners’ tastes.

>The stability of marriage, so understood, best ensures that children will know the committed love of those whose union brought them forth. This gives them the best shot at becoming healthy and happy people, which affects every other social good. That is why every society with the merest ambition to thrive has socially regulated male-female sexual bonds: to shore up the stabilizing norms of marriage, on which social order rests.

>If marriage is redefined (in law, and hence in public opinion and practice) as simple companionship for adult fulfillment, then, for reasons to be explained, it will be harder to live by its norms and urge them on others. And this will harm the social goods that hook society into regulating marriage in the first place.

>Besides defending these claims, my coauthors and I answer the most common objections to the historic view of marriage. And we show how society can uphold that view without ignoring the needs, undermining the social dignity, or curbing the fulfillment of same-sex attracted people.

>#Misreadings

>...

I end the clip at that point from this article as this is a succinct presentation of their book, What Is Marriage?

>Yes, buildings generally have to be in places. Saying that the made-up accusation against Canada, which is solely based on the fact that it is located in Canada, is in turn proven by that very location is a special kind of circular reasoning. What exactly is your Wikipedia link supposed to prove?

I am surprised you have trouble understanding that "a buildings location" can have a HUGE influence on what that building does. If the building of WADA is on Canadian soil, dont you think that the government of Canada would have a say on what goes on? And my accusation is not made up, given that I live in Canada and if you open the World News section of any major newspaper here in Canada it will be anti-Russian and even Trudeau has declared Russia as Canada's adversary. So to say that Canada would engage in dirty politics against Russia is not a long stretch.

>Then you're absolutely deluded. There are no propaganda sources directly run by the government in any Western country like there are in Russia. Before you embarrass yourself with "muh BBC", please look into the difference between publicly owned and funded vs literally run by the government.

Except all of the channels in America belong to people with influence in the Democratic Party. There is a good video on the topic, I will see if I csn find it later but for now read this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_media

Also, the media in Russia is private and is not government run.

>Ignoring that this is exactly the same kind of whataboutism you applied to doping, no, we have not discovered that. If anything the past year has seen some stellar investigate reporting in Western media. What are you talking about? Concrete examples with evidence, please.

Surely you remember the alleged Trump Russian collusion as was touted by the MSM, well that is fake news and was invented by the media.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2017/05/23/there-remains-no-evidence-of-trump-russia-collusion/amp/

Here are some more examples:
http://researchguides.ben.edu/c.php?g=608230&p=4220071

You are delusional if you think that publically owned media cannot be manipulated by the government. Noam Chomsky writes about how big of a problem it is in Manufactering Consent

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

>That does absolutely nothing to answer my question. Do you acknowledge that Russian athletes doped and that the Russian Olympic Committee orchestrated systematic doping? Yes or no?

I acknowledge that some Russian athletes may have doped, as they do anywhere. I remain unconvinced there was a systemic doping program. Convince me.

>Which you have yet to prove. And "every other country" is quite the assertion without any evidence.

I already provided evidence that Norway uses steroids in asthmatic nasal spray. You conveniently ignored it.

http://theduran.com/sabotaging-russia-olympics/

46% of athletes in skiing, not just russian have returned an abnormal blood test.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/science-and-health/2018/2/14/17003898/olympics-russia-doping-science

It is very common.

>No criminals should ever be punished because some criminals avoid getting captured?

No innocents should be blamed for someone planting fake 'evidence'. Thats why many of the medals 'stripped' of Russian athletes have been returned as there was no evidence of systemic Russuan doping. Seen in link above.

>Since you claim both of these things happen "often", I assume you can name multiple examples of each and have evidence for tampering for at least several of them?

Look above.

>In your link to some obscure right-wing conspiracy site, there is nothing but conjecture and assumptions.

They provide links to everything that is slightly controversial. In addition they make a claim that most of the medals were returned to Russia - that is true. My thumbs hurt from typing on the phone. Get off your lazy ass and go research itnyourself. Perhaps you will stop thinking that just because its a "known" resource its somehow reputable.

>Right wing

LOL. How does whether something is right wing invalidate it? Its the Lefties that always lie and fabricate stories.

https://www.amazon.ca/SJWs-Always-Lie-Thought-Justice-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

@KubrickIsMyCopilot, Your argument is bad and you should feel bad. It's clear that you haven't read "Why Civil Resistance Works," which is the book that this article is based on, or you wouldn't be making this argument. The authors looked at data from the last 100 years of both violent and nonviolent conflict, which is what led them to the conclusion that nonviolent civil resistance is 2-3x more effective than violent resistance. They provide case studies of both violent and nonviolent revolutions that illustrate their hypothesis for why this is the case. Put simply, violence is barrier to entry for most people. Violence as a political tactic appeals primarily to a very small slice of the population, mainly men ages 16-45 years old who are willing to physically harm other people (this is actually a very small proportion of the overall population). Nonviolent resistance is able to incorporate people from all demographics of the population, including men who aren't willing to hurt others, most women, civil servants, artists, intellectuals, academics, clergy, etc. (i.e. the people who typically make up a movement). Here's where this gets really important: every revolution that engaged 3.5% of the population on a sustained basis was victorious, though many were succesful at a lower rate of participation. But that means if you get to 3.5%, then you win, according to the data. Here's the kicker: no violent revolution made it to 3.5%. You see, violence narrows the range of people your revolution can appeal to, so if you can only target males b/w 16-45 who're willing to hurt people for political purposes, let's be generous and say that's 10% of the population. That means you have to get 1/3 of them to participate in order to win (i.e. 3.5% out of 10%). However, if your movement instills nonviolent discipline in its leaders, then you can target up to 100% of the population (demographically), meaning you only need to recruit 1/30 to guarantee victory (3.5% out of 100%). Nonviolence is 2-3x more effective than violence when it comes to victory, but as a recruitment tactic, it's 10 times more effective.

Here's the author's TED Talk which lays all this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w

Here's a link to the book "Why Civil Resistance Works": https://www.amazon.ca/Why-Civil-Resistance-Works-Nonviolent/dp/0231156839

P.S. The historical reference to the Nazis is also fallacious. For example, look up the history of the White Roses (or watch the movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days). The German population became more susceptible to electoral campaigns focused on "law and order" due to the street brawls breaking out between Nazis and communists. Violent resistance was a precipitating factor in Hitler's rise to power.

Well everything is a shade of grey. But generally the more violent, the less successful. I'm getting my info from this book FYI. Good read overall.

There have been pretty effective nonviolent movements though. The Velvet Revolution was pretty fricken nonviolent.

Different context of course.

This may surprise you but anarchists have arguments against standard social contract theory and believe it is invalid. The first 3 chapters of this book make a decent case against social contract theory (sorry I can't find the chapters online):

http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-Political-Authority-Examination/dp/1137281650/

For those curious about the root causes of government corruption and the solution, I recommend The Problem of Political Authority

I doubt it.

If you really want to know more go read

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1507785607/ref=pd_aw_sbs_b_1?refRID=0PNVXSM20W0E2N4NBTEH

Theres a free pdf of the book on his homepage too

So true. It is sad to see them turn into a SJW party and we all know the three fundamental laws of SJW:

1. SJWs always lie
   
2. SJWs always double down
   
3. SJWs always project
   

645 reviews on a website people actually use to review books - https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Thought-Justice-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

Anarcho-capitalism. Read:

• For A New Liberty by Murray Rothbard
  
• The Machinery of Freedom, third edition, by David Friedman. Second edition is available on the web.
  
• The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer
  
  
  After reading those books you will have a satisfactory answer.

For introductory purposes, it's best to read surveys of the literature and tradition, simply because there are many anarchist schools of thought and people often direct you to read books from the school to which they are sympathetic.

I recommend starting off with [Peter Kropotkin's 1909 essay for Encyclopedia Britannica on Anarchism] (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html).

Next, I'd recommend [Men Against the State] (http://www.amazon.com/Men-Against-State-Expositors-Individualist/dp/0879260068), a historical overview of the American Anarchist traditions, which were a kind of anarchist melting pot but admittedly skewed individualist (you could probably find a free pdf of this quickly).

These books should provide good introductions to various schools. After that, just pick up the books in whatever school suits your fancy and enjoy.

My biased recommendations are Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism and Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority. They are both works done by conteporary academic philosophers but written simply and without jargon.

edit: It would be wonderful if whoever downvoted my comment could explain why.

Meget relevant bog til emnet:

http://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

Den definitive bog omkring SJWs, misandrister og lignende.

Ok, so you just chose not to count all those previous CPUs, and built your argument on top of that.

You need one of these.

This book explains the entire phenomena pretty well:

https://www.amazon.com/SJWs-Always-Lie-Taking-Thought-ebook/dp/B014GMBUR4

> This is really disingenuous.

Nope. It's entirely accurate. You're the one being disingenuous.

>it was a symptom of the white supremacism and hatred

You're a liar, but that's no surprise. SJWs always lie.